Why we do not run Facebook Ads anymore, or how i growth hacked my competitors Ads [Real-life Example]

Summary

In this article i will try to describe why you should not run facebook ads because your competitors can easily hack your marketing strategy and target audience. Facebook Ads are great way to reach your target audience for consumer apps, but it is costly especially if you are bootstrapping.

Foreword

I am solo-founder of consumer app which helps to get truck and help for any moving & delivery needs at negotiable flat cost.
As every founder i invested all my saving in my company to develop mobile app and tried to raise funds to further develop app and gain paying users.

I gave up on my fundraising when one VC from Chicago told me-”Immigrants like you need to work, not to found company”. I grouped and decided to bootstrap my startup.
Honestly, I suck at fundraising but rock on product development and vision.

Long story short, bootstrapping opened up my mind and vision and helped to sort users and figure out who is our power users and where they hang out.

I spent $1948 and gained only $450. Yeap it Hurts and Sucks!

What i noticed that in order to get your ad to work and see results your Facebook pixel should have enough data and daily budget should to be as a minimum $50.
I did not have funding so did not have money to dump and let facebook ads learn what works better for me, so i decided to hack my competitors ads and see what they are targeting.

Business is a war, in war anything is better than indecision

Find what ads you competitors are running

1 Search your competitors Facebook Page and navigate to Page Transparency and click on See More.

2 You will get nice report about page.

On This page pay attention on Tab — People Who Manage This Page, it will give you idea in which country your competitors hires/have social media manager/marketer.
Click on — Go to Ad Library

3- Facebook Ad Library will show all Active and Inactive Ads.
In my case i got this as a result:

It shows how much my competitor spent and which country was his target market.

Let`s dive deep.

4- Choose Ad and click on click on “See Ad Details”, and Here you go!
We got info whom , where they were targeting.

As i understood -”Facebook Ads all about who pours more money, wins!”
If you want to hire this information, you might need to delete you ad from Ad Manager.

By getting all this information now you can create your Facebook Ad Campaign.

By gathering all that information, i found in which my super users hanging out and started to target them.

You can write Selenium script or use phantombuster.com

Steps which i did :

1-Use Facebook Ads Library Scraper
2- Use Facebook Group Extractor
3- Once you have Facebook group members info, sort them and use Facebook Message Sender

Now you directly target your audience without spending money on Facebook Ads.

Conclusion

This Tactics worked out for us and helps to get customers, and brings $5k in MRR. It works for different locations and even countries.

There are a lot of tweaks which you can do with facebook, it is only limited to your imagination .