Today we’re going to do an interesting experiment and analyze the running ads of Kylie Cosmetics. The online store uses Shopify and FB ads to promote its products into Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, etc.

Let’s see their current running FB ads. It’s really easy. Open Facebook ads library using this link and add the FB handle of the store. As an example:

FB Ads library 

Now that we know how to find the FB ads of anyone on Facebook, let’s see which filters can help us narrow our search:

  • Geographic region or country

FB ads filter country

  • Filter by platform – you can select if you want to see ads only for Instagram 

FB ads filter platform

  • Time-frame called “Impressions by Date”

FB ads filter date

We know how to use the filter. Now, let’s dissect an ad to see what it is telling us.

FB ad detail

FB Ad in detail:

  1. On the top left side you’ll find out  if it is active or not
  2. You can see when it started running
  3. You have ID
  4. It says that this same ad has many versions. FB explains it in more detail – “This ad uses one of our dynamic products, where advertisers provide a combination of images, text and platform-specific preferences so our system can automatically create the right combination for the audience.” 
  5. You can see the FB ad itself. You can read the text, see the visuals, call to action, etc. 
  6. On the bottom, you can press the “See Ad Details” button. When you press it, you see:

FB ads Add Details

Now that we know what it all means, let’s start analyzing the FB ads of the online store. 

Kylie Cosmetics

Kylie Cosmetics was founded by Kylie Jenner who is a social media influencer and phenomena. The store makes hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly revenue. It all started by promoting the products through Kylie’s own social media accounts and of course through all the Kardashian accounts. And now it needs further growth, so a lot of FB ads are used. What are the several things that make an impression:

  • There are active ads that were created in February 2020. This article was written on the 5 September

February

  • The ads mostly use static static images of women’s faces showing their lips. There are short videos like the one here but they are exceptions. 

Static images lips

  • They advertise on all the platforms. They use all the formats suitable for feeds, stories, Messenger, Instagram, etc 
  • Ads are duplicated in order to grab more of the audience and to find out which one is performing better. Then they’ll boost it with a higher budget.

Kylie duplicated

  • They use ladies with different skin colors to resonate with their audience and to better visualize their products.

Different skin color

In summary, Kylie Cosmetics uses FB ads to really show their product in detail. They are extremely active in social media advertising and the images they use are very carefully selected to visualize in the most vivid way the colors of the lipsticks. Moreover, they stick to an ad if it’s successful as shown by the active ones from February.

If you want to be successful with FB ads you must understand the basics and how it works. “How Facebook ads algorithm ranks your ads” can open your eyes on how FB works. Two additional helpful articles are “How to capture the attention with your Ads” and “Facebook Ad Creative – How to build one?”. 

Thank you for reading and do you think that using mostly static images is good? Оr using videos or GIFS might be better?