Can SOCIALFUEL show me a competitor’s ROAS or ad spend?

No, and neither can any other tool. Performance metrics live inside the advertiser’s own ad account and are never public. What SOCIALFUEL shows is how long each ad has been running, which is the strongest public proxy for performance — losing ads get switched off quickly, so a long-running ad is one the advertiser keeps choosing to pay for.

How long does an ad need to run before it counts as a winner?

Judge it relative to the brand’s own rotation speed rather than a fixed number. If most of their ads last a fortnight and one has run for three months, that one is the winner. Ads live for only a few days carry no signal yet.

Why does sorting by longevity beat sorting by likes or engagement?

Engagement measures whether people reacted, not whether the ad made money. A funny ad can collect thousands of likes and still be switched off for missing its cost per acquisition. Budget survival is the harder test and the more honest one.

Guides

How to tell if a competitor’s ad is working

4 min read

What you’ll be able to do: Identify a competitor’s genuine winners without access to a single performance metric.

The honest version: nobody can see their numbers

No tool can show you a competitor’s ROAS, CPA or conversion rate. Anyone claiming otherwise is guessing or lying. Those numbers live inside the advertiser’s ad account and are never public.

What is public is far more useful than most people realise: how long each ad has been running.

Longevity is the proxy, and it is a good one

Paid media is ruthless. An ad that is not producing gets switched off, usually within days, because it is costing real money every hour it runs. So an ad that has been live for ninety days has survived ninety days of somebody looking at the numbers and deciding to keep paying for it.

That makes ad age the closest thing to a public performance signal there is. The longest-running ad in a brand’s account is almost always their best ad. Sort by longevity and you are looking at a list the competitor’s own media buyer has already validated with their budget.

How to read it without fooling yourself

Compare within a brand, not across brands. A 60-day ad is remarkable for a brand that rotates weekly and unremarkable for one that never refreshes.
Load the full set first. Ranked results skew old, so judging age off page one inflates every number. Page to the end.
Watch for the cluster. If five ads share one angle and all of them are old, that angle is the winner — not any single piece of creative.
Discount brand-new ads entirely. An ad live for two days carries no information yet. It is a test, not a result.

What to do with the winner once you have found it

Do not copy the creative. Copy the decision behind it. Run the winning ad through a decode to get the hook, the angle, the offer and the audience it is speaking to, then build your own execution against that strategy. Copying the artwork gets you a worse version of their ad; copying the reasoning gets you your own winner.

Frequently asked questions

Can SOCIALFUEL show me a competitor’s ROAS or ad spend?: No, and neither can any other tool. Performance metrics live inside the advertiser’s own ad account and are never public. What SOCIALFUEL shows is how long each ad has been running, which is the strongest public proxy for performance — losing ads get switched off quickly, so a long-running ad is one the advertiser keeps choosing to pay for.
How long does an ad need to run before it counts as a winner?: Judge it relative to the brand’s own rotation speed rather than a fixed number. If most of their ads last a fortnight and one has run for three months, that one is the winner. Ads live for only a few days carry no signal yet.
Why does sorting by longevity beat sorting by likes or engagement?: Engagement measures whether people reacted, not whether the ad made money. A funny ad can collect thousands of likes and still be switched off for missing its cost per acquisition. Budget survival is the harder test and the more honest one.