Vital Mission is a boutique performance marketing agency that specializes in generating high-quality leads and sales through advertising for its clients. In this case study, Florian Kölling (Co-Founder) provides insight into how they were able to optimize their competitive analysis with the help of top-ads and thereby create better creatives.
Challenge
Effective Competitive Analysis: In performance marketing, it is essential to stay updated on the best advertisements and strategies. Florian and his team spent a lot of time in the competitors' Ad Libraries to understand which ads, messages, and formats are currently being widely used in the respective industries.
Limitations of the Conventional Ad Library: While Meta's common Ad Library provides an overview of active advertisements per brand, it lacks an assessment of the ads' performance. Without clear data on budget usage and relevance, it was difficult to make informed decisions for their own ads. Moreover, one can only view one brand at a time, which means you have an overview of specific brands rather than industries.
After testing various tools, they decided to go with top-ads.
Application & Results
Targeted Ad Research: The team at Vital Mission uses top-ads to conduct competitive analyses more efficiently & effectively - especially during the onboarding of new clients. The research is faster than with the Ad Library and also better due to the data on Ad Spend, as one can expect better performance from ads with conversion optimization when there is more ad spend. Thus, one gets an overview of the strongest ads of a brand or niche in a very short time.
The team then uses these insights to optimally align the strategy for the client:
E-Commerce Use Case - Awareness Level in the Market: Based on the strongest ads in a niche, one can deduce which awareness level (according to Eugene Schwartz) currently dominates among consumers in the market. Following this insight, Florian and his team then align their messages in the ads accordingly.
Effective Strategy Development (Lead Gen): In a specific real estate lead generation case, top-ads showed that a competitor identified by the client had actually spent very little budget on ads. Therefore, in the strategic alignment, they consciously did not rely on this competitor's assumptions but developed a differentiated strategy that was very successful.
Optimization of the Creative Process: The team creates industry-specific inspiration boards to store the best ads within a niche. These boards are integrated into the briefing process so that the creative team can work directly with successful examples as inspiration.
Result: Through the data and visual preparation from top-ads, Vital Mission was able to develop high-performing advertisements more quickly and purposefully, based on real market insights. At the same time, the research process was made significantly more efficient.
Conclusion & Outlook
With top-ads, Vital Mission was able to make informed decisions based on real data, allowing them to create better creatives and optimize their performance marketing strategies. The tool saves valuable time in research and helps to recognize relevant trends and competitive strategies early on. The team also plans to continue using top-ads regularly for their clients in the future.
"What distinguishes top ads from comparable tools is the combination of data and clear visualization. Therefore, I can really recommend this tool to anyone who runs paid advertising on Meta."
