As a business owner or marketer, it’s important to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, especially when it comes to their LinkedIn advertising campaigns. LinkedIn ads can provide valuable insights into your competitors’ messaging, targeting, budgets, and overall digital marketing strategies. While you don’t want to completely copy what your competitors are doing, analyzing their LinkedIn ads can help inspire new ideas and optimize your own LinkedIn ad campaigns.
Why you should spy on competitor LinkedIn ads
Here are some of the key reasons you should make it a habit to regularly spy on competitors’ LinkedIn ads:
- See what messaging they are using to reach your shared target audience
- Discover new customer segments or personas you may want to target
- Get ideas for creative ad formats and designs that perform well
- Gauge approximately how much they are spending on LinkedIn ads
- Identify gaps or opportunities in their LinkedIn advertising strategy
- Inspire new angles and approaches to test in your own LinkedIn ads
- Learn about new products, services, and offers being promoted
Essentially, monitoring your competitors’ LinkedIn ads allows you to benchmark your performance and uncover areas where you may have an opportunity to outshine them with your own LinkedIn advertising. It pays to know what your competition is up to.
How to view competitor LinkedIn ads
So how can you actually spy on a competitor’s LinkedIn ads? Here are a few methods to view ads from brands in your space:
LinkedIn Ad Library
LinkedIn offers an ad library where you can search for and view ads from any company or brand that is currently running LinkedIn ad campaigns. This gives you a bird’s eye view of all the active ads for that business across all of LinkedIn.
To use the LinkedIn Ad Library:
- Go to https://www.linkedin.com/ad/library
- Enter your competitor’s name or company LinkedIn page URL
- Filter by date range and country if desired
- Scroll through all of their active Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail, and Text Ads
This is a quick and easy way to get a snapshot of a competitor’s current LinkedIn advertising and see what types of messages and creative they are using.
Your own LinkedIn feed
Another simple way to monitor a competitor’s ads is to watch for them in your own LinkedIn feed. Since LinkedIn targets ads based on member profiles and engagement, their ads may show up in your feed if you fall into their target audience.
Check your LinkedIn feed regularly and scroll through posts to see if any ads appear from your competitor’s company page or brand. You can then click on the ads to analyze the copy, design, and calls-to-action more closely.
Incognito browsing
For a more anonymous viewing experience, try opening an incognito or private browser window and searching for the competitor brand or company name. You’ll get a version of their LinkedIn ads based on a generic user profile rather than your own.
This can help you see how their ads may differ when targeting less qualified audiences vs. those already familiar with the brand. Monitor which ads show up after a broad branded keyword search vs. a long-tail product or offer-based keyword.
What to look for when spying on LinkedIn ads
When analyzing a competitor’s LinkedIn ads, here are some of the key elements to pay attention to:
Messaging and copy
- What phrases, claims, and messaging are they using?
- What emotional appeals or sentiment do their ads convey? Educational? Humorous? Inspirational?
- Do they focus on product features or customer benefits?
- How does their messaging align to different parts of the sales funnel? Are they focused on awareness, consideration or conversion?
Ad creative
- What visuals, graphics and videos are they using?
- What design elements make their ads stand out on LinkedIn?
- Do they lean towards stock photos or custom branded images?
- Are there any new ad formats like polls or lead gen forms?
Targeting and segmentation
- What types of job titles, companies, or industries do they seem to target?
- Can you tell if they target by seniority, location, gender or interests?
- Are they going broad with awareness messaging or narrow with direct response?
CTAs and landing pages
- What are the primary calls-to-action in their ads? Free trial, content offer, event registration, etc.
- What form fields or info are they trying to capture on landing pages?
- How do they nurture leads post-click? Email drip campaigns, retargeting?
Budget and spend
- Approximately how many active ads do they have running? What’s the monthly volume?
- How frequently do you see their ads? Consistently or intermittent?
- Do they seem to have sophisticated targeting and segmentation?
- Have they been running LinkedIn ads for a long time or are they new?
Making guesses about their budget and ad spend levels can help you gauge where you may have room to expand your own LinkedIn ads investment.
Competitive intelligence tools
In addition to the manual monitoring techniques above, there are also several software tools available that can help automatically track competitors’ digital ads and provide competitive intelligence reports.
Here are some top options specifically for monitoring LinkedIn ads:
Tool | Key Features |
---|---|
Adthena | Ad creative analysis, spend estimates, campaign tracking |
Contently | Ad copy analysis, messaging intelligence |
Khoros Care | Full ad management platform plus competitive intel |
Sagon Phior | Ad performance benchmarks, auction insights |
Socialinsider | Ad monitoring, analysis of messaging and creatives |
The dashboards and reports from these tools provide additional visibility into competitors’ overall digital ad strategies and spend allocation across platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Google.
Put insights into action
The most important part of monitoring your competitors’ LinkedIn ads is figuring out how to actually apply the intelligence in your own LinkedIn ad campaigns. Here are some ways to take action on what you learn:
- Test similar ad formats or creatives that seem to resonate
- Target some overlapping—but not identical—audience segments
- Improve underperforming areas of your LinkedIn strategy
- Adjust your bids and budgets to compete in-auction
- Double down on messaging or products they aren’t covering
- Pivot your ads to differentiate from competitors
Avoid blatantly copying competitor ads, but let what you learn influence how you craft messaging, attract attention, and stand out with your own LinkedIn advertising.
Conclusion
Spying on your competitors’ LinkedIn ads shouldn’t be seen as shady or underhanded. When done ethically, it’s an opportunity to learn important lessons from brands already seeing success with LinkedIn advertising. Use what you discover to make smarter choices in your own strategy and creatives.
Monitor competitor LinkedIn ads consistently over time. Look beyond specific tactics and creative to understand the bigger picture of their positioning and audience targeting. Combine manual monitoring with tools to automate tracking and analysis. Finally, bring these insights back to your own team to drive continuous testing and improvement.
Smart competitive intelligence will fuel better decision making in your LinkedIn ad campaigns and ultimately help accelerate performance. Just don’t go overboard in directly copying competitors. Use the lessons as inspiration to fuel innovative and original LinkedIn advertising that helps your brand stand out while avoiding head-to-head cannibalization of shared audiences. Competitor ad spying is most powerful when translated into strategic action tailored uniquely to your brand objectives and customers.
With the right competitive intelligence approach, monitoring competitor LinkedIn ads can be an advantage rather than a dirty trick. Use these tips and tools to track rival brand activity in an ethical, constructive way that informs your own LinkedIn advertising success.
Spying on competitors’ LinkedIn ads provides helpful intelligence, but it’s a delicate balancing act. Here are some ethical guidelines to follow:
- Don’t outright copy full ad creative, copy and targeting
- Aggregate data from multiple competitors, don’t single out just one
- Keep ad monitoring at a reasonable, non-excessive frequency
- Don’t misrepresent yourself or engage in false personas
- Use tracking purely for internal analysis, not public shaming
- Avoid scraping significant creative assets or intellectual property
The goal should be gaining advertising inspiration and directional insights, not explicitly duplicating someone else’s strategy. Maintain proper etiquette and you’ll be able to leverage competitor LinkedIn ad intel to ethically enhance your own ads.
Spying on competitor LinkedIn ads requires patience and diligence, but it often uncovers interesting insights. Here are some surprising examples of intel uncovered by monitoring competitor ad activity:
- A major brand launching a secret new product line revealed in their LinkedIn targeting
- A competitor drastically increasing their LinkedIn ad budget month-over-month
- Ads from an unknown emerging competitor targeting the same audience
- A company completely revamping its messaging to focus on new emotional appeals
- A pattern of testing many different creative variants and calls-to-action
- A dominating brand surprisingly going silent and halting ads for some reason
You never know just what you’ll uncover when actively watching competitors’ LinkedIn advertising moves. Consistent monitoring pays dividends in strategic and tactical insights.
LinkedIn advertising presents a dynamic, ever-changing environment. Brands iterate quickly, trying out new messaging, targeting and creative approaches. The digital ad landscape shifts rapidly. By regularly spying on competitors’ LinkedIn ads, you’ll gain an advantageous understanding of not just what competitors are doing now, but how they are evolving over time.
Consistent ad monitoring yields longitudinal insights you’d completely miss with occasional one-off checks. Make competitor ad tracking a habit, and you’ll enhance your capacity to outmaneuver rivals based on a superior grasp of the latest LinkedIn advertising playbook.
When spying on competitors’ LinkedIn ads, look across both desktop and mobile to see potential differences in how they reach audiences on various devices. Some key questions to explore:
- Do they show different ads on desktop vs. mobile? Why?
- Is their messaging or offer altered based on assumed device intent?
- Do they employ different creative strategies and formats?
- What do their landing pages look like on mobile vs. desktop?
- Can you uncover differences in whom they target by device?
Analyzing the interplay between competitors’ desktop and mobile LinkedIn advertising provides more nuanced understanding of their overall approach. Pay attention to these cross-device dynamics as you craft your own LinkedIn ad strategy.
Here are some signs your competitor may be outsmarting you with their LinkedIn advertising tactics:
- Their ads generate much higher engagement
- They seem to target more niche audiences
- Their messaging sounds more distinctive
- They test way more ad variations
- Their ads appear more prominently in your feed
- They convert leads at a higher rate from ads
- Their ads drive increased website traffic
- They consistently launch new ad campaigns
- Their ads appear more tailored to individuals
Any combination of these signals suggests your competitor may have an upper hand with their current LinkedIn advertising approach. Use these signs as triggers to pay even closer attention to analyzing and learning from their LinkedIn ads.
With both organic content and paid advertising, LinkedIn is a highly strategic platform that requires constant testing and optimization. Don’t get complacent or assume you’ll always maintain an advertising edge over competitors. Keep spying on their LinkedIn ads to make sure you don’t fall behind rivals’ activities.
Here are some tactical tips for improving your competitive intelligence when monitoring competitors’ LinkedIn ads:
- Check LinkedIn daily to catch short-lived ads
- Note dayparting patterns of when ads appear
- Compare different targeting segments and personas
- Pay attention to changes over time, not just current state
- Blend manual monitoring with software tracking
- Search for ads incognito and logged out for broader reach
- Screenshot ads for easy sharing and reference
- Create a spreadsheet to document key metrics and insights
- Set Google Alerts on brand names for news of new campaigns
With some diligence and the right tracking process, you can significantly amplify the amount of useful intel gained from monitoring competitors’ LinkedIn ad activity on an ongoing basis.
Spying on competitors’ LinkedIn ads requires patience, but you should expect to see meaningful patterns emerge over a few months. Be systematic and organized in your tracking to spot trends. Here are some questions to guide analysis of longitudinal LinkedIn ad intelligence:
- Are they ramping up spend or pulling back?
- Have they expanded or narrowed targeting?
- Is engagement increasing or decreasing over time?
- How has messaging changed quarter to quarter?
- Are they doubling down on certain ad formats?
- Have they entered or exited market segments?
- Is there seasonality in their offers or campaigns?
Continuously adding context to competitors’ LinkedIn advertising behavior leads to deeper strategic insights you would likely miss with sporadic monitoring. Keep at it consistently.
Spying on competitors’ LinkedIn ads can provide all sorts of useful nuggets to help inform your strategy, but remember not to go overboard in directly copying their tactics. Use the intelligence for inspiration and directional guidance, but make sure your LinkedIn advertising still feels authentic to your brand.
The most damaging result of competitor ad spying is becoming a bland imitation of someone else versus leveraging those insights to spark innovative ideas tailored to your unique customers and business goals. Learn from competitors, but keep true to what makes your brand special.
Monitoring competitors’ LinkedIn ads is neither unethical nor underhanded despite the term “spying”. Done properly, it’s a constructive practice for discovering new strategies and approaches to borrow from fellow advertisers also trying to master LinkedIn advertising.
Just maintain ethical practices in how you collect and use competitor ad intelligence. The insights you gain will serve as inspiration for testing better ideas, not explicitly copying a rival. Competitive learning will make you a smarter LinkedIn advertiser.
In summary, keep close tabs on competitors’ LinkedIn ads, but do so in an honorable, deliberate manner. Absorb the lessons their ad strategies have to impart. Let them challenge you to improve. With the right ethics and attitude, monitoring competitors’ LinkedIn ads will elevate your marketing game.