How to See Competitor LinkedIn Ads?

LinkedIn is a powerful platform for B2B marketing, offering companies a chance to engage with professionals, generate leads, and boost brand awareness through targeted ads. As a business owner or marketer, understanding how your competitors are utilizing LinkedIn Ads can give you a competitive advantage. In this blog post, we’ll explore different ways you can check if your competitors are running LinkedIn ads and how you can use this information to enhance your own marketing strategy.

1. Use LinkedIn’s Ad Transparency Feature

LinkedIn, like many other social platforms, has introduced Ad Transparency features to give users insight into the ads that companies are running. This allows you to easily see what kind of ads a competitor is using, even if you are not part of their target audience. Here’s how you can use LinkedIn’s native transparency tools to check competitor ads:

Steps to View Competitor Ads on LinkedIn:

1. Visit the LinkedIn Page of the competitor you are interested in.
2. On the right-hand side of their page, locate the section called “Posts”, and click on “Ads” in the dropdown menu.
3. You’ll be able to view all the active ads that the company is running on LinkedIn. These ads will display how they are targeting users and what creative content they are using.

This is the easiest and most direct way to check if a competitor is running LinkedIn ads, and it gives you insights into their ad formats, messaging, and visual strategies.

2. Check the Company’s LinkedIn Activity

Another method to see if a company is running LinkedIn ads is by closely following their LinkedIn activity. Although promoted content will often appear in user feeds as sponsored posts, you can also gain insights by observing the types of content they promote organically.

Steps to Analyze Company Activity:

1. Follow your competitor’s LinkedIn page or regularly check their posts.
2. Take note of any promoted content labeled as “Sponsored” in your feed or in their post activity section.
3. If they are using LinkedIn ads to promote certain posts or services, they may be running ad campaigns with similar themes.

While this method isn’t as straightforward as using the Ad Transparency feature, it can still provide useful insights into their ad strategies and messaging.

3. Use Third-Party Tools to Track LinkedIn Ads

If you want to take your competitive research a step further, you can use third-party tools to track and analyze LinkedIn ads. These tools can provide deeper insights into a company’s LinkedIn advertising efforts, such as their ad spend, targeting strategies, and engagement metrics.

Popular Third-Party Tools for Tracking LinkedIn Ads:

• SEMrush: This tool offers social media analytics and competitive insights that include LinkedIn ad data, helping you understand how your competitors are leveraging the platform.
• SpyFu: Primarily focused on PPC ads, SpyFu provides insights into a company’s social media ads, including LinkedIn campaigns.
• AdEspresso: Known for its ad management features, AdEspresso allows you to track and analyze LinkedIn ads, making it easier to spot competitors’ strategies.

Using these tools, you can uncover more detailed information about your competitors’ ad campaigns, helping you optimize your own LinkedIn advertising strategy.

4. Analyze LinkedIn’s Sponsored Content in Your Feed

LinkedIn ads often appear in the form of sponsored content in user feeds. These ads are labeled as “Sponsored,” and they can include a variety of formats such as single-image ads, video ads, carousel ads, and lead generation forms. By simply engaging with a competitor’s page, visiting their website, or interacting with their posts, you might trigger more of their sponsored ads to appear in your feed.

Steps to Spot Competitor Sponsored Ads:

1. Follow your competitors on LinkedIn and engage with their posts and content.
2. Browse LinkedIn regularly to see if any sponsored ads from your competitors appear in your feed. These are labeled with a “Sponsored” tag.
3. Take note of the type of content they are promoting and how often their ads appear in your feed.

By observing the content and frequency of their ads, you can gauge their ad strategy and see how they are engaging with LinkedIn’s professional audience.

Why Monitoring Competitor LinkedIn Ads is Important

Tracking and analyzing your competitors’ LinkedIn ads provides a wealth of insights that can be used to improve your own advertising efforts. Here are the main advantages:

• Understand their messaging and offers: By monitoring their ads, you can see what value propositions, offers, or promotions they are using to attract their audience.
• Discover their audience targeting: Based on the content of the ads and the engagement they receive, you can infer who they are targeting and adapt your own targeting accordingly.
• Learn about their creative strategies: Analyze the design and copy used in competitor ads to keep your own campaigns fresh and competitive.
• Benchmark ad frequency and spend: Track how often your competitors are running ads to help plan your own ad budget and schedule more effectively.

By regularly checking your competitors’ LinkedIn ads, you can stay ahead of industry trends, refine your advertising strategy, and uncover opportunities to outperform them.

Conclusion

Monitoring competitor LinkedIn ads is an essential strategy for staying competitive in the B2B marketing space. LinkedIn’s ad transparency features, combined with third-party tools and sponsored content analysis, allow you to gather valuable insights into how other companies are using the platform. By applying these insights to your own campaigns, you can enhance your LinkedIn advertising efforts and achieve better results.

At Watsspace, we specialize in creating high-impact social media advertising strategies tailored to your business. If you’re looking to improve your LinkedIn ads or expand your presence on social media, contact us today to learn how we can help your business grow through effective digital marketing.