How to Analyse Competitor Ads the Right Way

How to Properly Analyse Your Competitors’ Ad Creative

Competitor research is a big part of a good marketing strategy. When you know what’s working (or not) for your competitors, you can use that to significantly improve your own ad campaigns.

Many brands use tools like the Facebook Ads Library or other ad transparency centres to analyse their competitors’ ad creative. However, these only provide a snapshot of their campaigns - what’s currently running and for how long. To get a more comprehensive understanding of your competitors’ ad creative, you will need to dig deeper.

In this guide, we’ll move beyond surface-level insights to explore how competitors approach their ad strategies. Using MagicBrief’s brand tracking tool, we’ll take a closer look at Juniper, digital health brand specialising in women's weight loss, to see how they test, refine, and scale their creatives.

Let's start:

Step 1: Assess Ad Volume and Frequency

Want to know how aggressive your competitors are with their ad strategy? Look at how often they launch new creatives and how many ads are in rotation. This gives you insight into their budget, testing cadence, and if they’re experimenting or doubling down on proven winners.

In general, Brands that launch new creatives often are actively testing, while long-running ads are usually successful ones they’re scaling.

Key things to look for:

How many active ads do they have? More ads mean more ad spend and ongoing testing.
How often are new creatives launched? Weekly or biweekly updates can hint at their iteration speed and strategy.
How long do ads stay live? Longer-running ads are usually top performers, which are being scaled.

Juniper’s Ad Volume and Testing Approach

According to MagicBrief data, Juniper is running an extremely aggressive testing approach, with:

181 new ads launched in the last 14 days, a 200% increase in creative output.
Ads leading to five different landing pages, likely testing multiple messaging approaches.

This suggests heavy optimisation, audience segmentation, or a major campaign push. They’re not just experimenting—they’re actively fine-tuning their best-performing creatives. It’s clear Juniper is moving fast, learning quickly, and doubling down on what works.

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Step 2: Identify Their Preferred Ad Formats and Content Style

Now it's time to analyse the type of content your competitors rely on. Are they using more short-form videos or static images? If they favor video, do they prefer user-generated content (UGC) over more polish, high-production content?

Many brands test new concepts and messaging with static images before shifting to video, while others prioritise video from the start, especially user-generated content. The key is to test and refine until you maximise every ad dollar spent.

How Juniper Approaches Ad Formats

Juniper leans slightly towards static images (55.7%) over videos (44.1%), suggesting that images remain their core format, though video still plays a major role.

Looking at their ads, we can see a mix of UGC-style testimonials, expert-led discussions (sometimes in a podcast format), and educational content.

They’ve also played around with social media and text message-inspired ads, plus unboxing content, to keep up with modern digital culture. By using familiar formats that people routinely engage with, their ads feel more natural and less like traditional marketing.

Some ads even incorporate news coverage footage, featuring real customer stories to enhance credibility and social proof.

Static images, on the other hand, focus on bold, fact-based messaging, often educating audiences on lesser known health insights.

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Juniper strikes a balance between casual, relatable content and trust-building messaging, making their ads more appealing to a wider audience of women.

Step 3: Evaluating Talent and Representation

A brand’s choice of talent speaks volumes about its positioning. Some lean on celebrities or influencers to build credibility, while others use everyday people to keep things relatable.

Brands are putting more focus on diversity, making sure their ads feel more inclusive. Juniper features a mix of ages and ethnicities, helping them reach a wider audience and possibly even lower ad costs.

They’ve even brought in Oprah, because let’s be honest - if Oprah backs it, people listen. Tapping into a trusted public figure adds instant credibility and reinforces trust in their brand.

Juniper also puts their own experts and employees front and center - a smart way to highlight their expertise. This not only reinforces their authority but also helps build trust with their audience.

Step 4: Identify Their Key Messaging

Messaging is what makes a brand a brand. Some brands use bold, fact-based statements or thought-provoking visuals to challenge norms, while others take a safer approach.

Juniper falls into the latter category.

Their messaging is all about medical credibility, value justification, and breaking weight loss stigma. Instead of pushing gimmicks or quick fixes, they position themselves as a trusted medical authority, focusing on science and research to set them apart.

This is also illustrated via their headlines:

“You're going to want to watch this if you're restricting your calories and still not losing weight.”
“My GP just weight shamed me.”
“No, we’re not cheap.”

These headlines tap into real struggles, like calorie restriction not working, the frustration of being judged for weight, and the reality that real solutions come at a cost. They spark conversation, challenge perceptions, and make people feel seen.

Juniper doesn’t shy away from the idea that medical weight loss is “cheating.” Instead, they shut it down completely, reframing the conversation around health and sustainability.

By addressing these contradictions head-on, Juniper’s messaging feels genuine. They’re selling a service and actively reshaping the conversation around weight loss - not an easy task in an industry built on fad diets and false promises.

Step 5: Track Your Competitor’s Testing Over Time

A competitors’ evolving strategy often lies in their testing. To track these changes over time, you can use tools like MagicBrief to see how their messaging, hooks, headlines, and CTAs evolve over time. This can give you valuable insights into what resonates with consumers in your industry.

If your competitors keep running the same ads, that’s a good sign the messaging works. If they’re always changing things, they’re likely testing and refining. Watch how often they tweak messaging, swap creatives, or scale certain ads.

What to Watch:

✔ Which ads stay live the longest?
✔ How often do they launch new ads?
✔ Are they refining specific formats or messaging?
✔ Do they drop underperforming ads quickly?

Step 6: Organise and Structure Newly Gained Insights

Tracking competitor ads is one thing, but the real value comes from organising and applying those insights to your own ad strategies.

So, instead of simply collecting screenshots, take note of which messaging, formats, and creative styles they've repeated, refined, or ditched completely. This helps distinguish one-off experiments from proven strategies that are worth learning from.

Once you discover patterns, categorise them and list out the key takeaways that you can apply to your own ad strategy. Some potential categories could be:

Format (e.g. static image, video)
Messaging (e.g. value proposition, call to action)
Creative style (e.g. UGC ads, testimonials, etc)
Scaling trends (e.g. which ads they invest in over time)

You can use MagicBrief's board feature to save ads from their Ad Library and organise them into specific folders or boards. These can be then sorted by format, messaging, creative style, or even competitor strategies to keep everything neat and easy to reference.

This level of organisation helps you quickly spot trends and patterns, making it easier to use this intel to sharpen your own campaigns.

Start Your Competitor Analysis with MagicBrief

A competitor ad analysis is all about tracking trends, identifying winning strategies, and gaining a competitive edge. With MagicBrief’s brand tracking tool, you can break down every element of your competitor’s creative, from messaging and content style to ad formats and landing pages.

After gathering these insights, start applying them to your own campaigns! You’ll find yourself making smarter creative decisions, testing more effectively, and refining your ads with confidence.

So why wait?

Book a demo with MagicBrief and start optimising your ad strategy today!

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