Hello! Our partner 3kota.shop - a Facebook accounts store - has prepared an interesting material. In this material, we will break down what a SPY-farm is, how it differs from regular spy services, and how to build your own database of accounts to find relevant advertising on Facebook.
What is called a SPY-farm
A SPY-farm - is a set of Facebook accounts, each of which is trained for a specific vertical and a specific GEO. Such profiles are used to find competitors' ads directly in the social network's feed.
Simply put, you log into an account and instead of regular ads, you see, for example, creatives for casino, crypto, or nutra that are currently being run for the selected audience.
Why build a farm when SPY-services exist
A logical question: why spend time on accounts if you can open a spy service and watch the ads there? The problem is that far from every ad gets into the databases of such services. Through prepared Facebook accounts, it is sometimes possible to find fresh creatives, funnels, and approaches that are not yet in public SPY-tools. This is exactly what people who already work with such farms note most often.
There are other advantages too:
you don't have to bypass cloaking yourself;
you can see ads that are running right now;
ads are shown exactly as a real user of the selected GEO sees them.
What a SPY-farm might look like
Imagine that a team works with gambling and regularly tests new countries. A designer, creative maker, or other employee might have a separate folder in an antidetect browser. It contains profiles for different GEOs: one account collects ads for Colombia, another - for Thailand, a third - for Poland, and so on. The employee opens the needed profile and gets a selection of relevant ads for the vertical of interest.
It's not enough just to see the ad, it's important to save it correctly for further analysis.
Downloading media: to download video and statics from Facebook, it is convenient to use special browser extensions or Telegram bots.
Saving links: always copy links to competitors' landings and pre-landings. They often "die" or get banned, so take screenshots of the whole page (Full Page Screen Capture) or save the source code of the site.
Tracking combinations: create a shared Google Sheet for the team, where you will record the GEO, type of creative, link to the landing page, and date of discovery.
What is required to build a farm
At the start, you need three main components:
Mobile proxies with the ability to work with different countries.
Antidetect browser to create separate profiles.
Facebook accounts of the needed GEOs, in the feed of which ads are already being shown.
Also, you must choose the vertical you plan to track in advance: gambling, crypto, nutra, or another niche. Next, we will break down the creation of a small SPY-farm using the example of searching for gambling creatives. With proxies and antidetects, everything is usually clear. The main difficulty lies in finding suitable accounts. It is extremely important that the GEO of your mobile proxies matches the GEO of the account. If you log into a Colombian profile from a European IP address, Facebook will quickly detect the anomaly and send the account to a checkpoint.
Freshly registered profiles are poorly suited for this task. You need accounts that already have a formed advertising feed. At the same time, far from every store offers profiles with ads for different countries.
Where to find Facebook accounts for the needed GEOs
In the 3kota.shop store, Facebook accounts with ads in the feed for different countries are available, including:
CO;
CZ;
PH;
TH;
AU;
PL;
ID;
other GEOs.
Also, on request, you can select or prepare a batch of accounts for a specific country with additional farming.
The general scheme looks like this:
choose a vertical;
determine the needed GEO;
select accounts and proxies;
create separate profiles in an antidetect browser;
train Facebook algorithms to show ads of the needed topic.
Our task - is to ensure that instead of standard ads, casino creatives start appearing in the feed.
How to trigger the needed ads in the feed
In practice, the initial setup takes about ten minutes. Let's look at the process using the example of a Ukrainian account, the feed of which initially shows regular ads. For Facebook, such a profile still looks like a standard user without a pronounced interest in gambling.
We need to let the algorithms know that the account owner is interested in casinos.
Step 1. Use Facebook search
Enter the word casino in the search bar.
Thematic public pages, publications, news, and advertisements will appear in the results. We are specifically interested in casino ads.
Step 2. Interact with the ads
We find several suitable advertising publications and start showing activity:
leave likes;
open the ads;
click on the advertising links.
It is advisable to perform such actions immediately with several different advertisers.
Step 3. Look for sites with Facebook tracking
Among the found ads, you should choose regular sites, not PWAs.It is important that Facebook tracking tools are installed on the page.
If Facebook is present in the list of connected services or trackers - this is a good sign. After following the link, you do not need to close the page immediately. Spend some time on the site:
leave the tab open;
navigate between sections;
click on elements;
launch a demo slot, if such an option is available.
This way, the algorithms will receive additional signals about the user's interest. If you need other niches, the algorithm remains the same, only the search queries and behavior change:
Nutra: look for the words "weight loss", "joints", "health", "cosmetology" in the language of the needed GEO. Go to clinic websites, read health blogs, like thematic posts about diets.
Crypto and finance: use queries like "investments", "trading", "crypto", "Forbes". Join earning groups, read financial news, and actively click on ads for banking and investment products.
When gambling ads will start appearing
If everything is done correctly, the first casino ads may appear in the feed within just a few minutes.
You also need to interact with them: leave reactions, open ads, and follow links to sites.
At the first stage, gambling may take up only one ad out of five or six. However, as the account continues to train, the share of the needed ads will gradually increase. As a result, the advertising feed of the profile will begin to consist primarily of relevant casino creatives.
It is important to understand that the social network's algorithms are inert. You shouldn't expect that after two clicks your feed will instantly turn into a solid casino. At first, these will be rare inclusions, but if you continue to methodically click, like, and follow links to sites, Facebook will finally rebuild your interest profile. While scrolling through the formed feed, pay attention not only to the visual part of the creatives, but also to the ad texts, calls to action (CTA), and comments under the posts - often it is there that you can find valuable insights about the pain points of the target audience and the reactions of real players to a specific offer.
In our case, the initial setup of the account took about ten minutes. After that, gambling ads already began to appear in the feed. However, the profile still required additional farming to increase its share from 30-40% to almost 100%.
Conclusion
If you collect accounts for the required GEOs once and train each profile for a specific vertical, the team will get a constant source of fresh creatives and advertising approaches. Such a SPY-farm allows you to regularly find new ideas, study working combinations of competitors, and track ads that are running right now. Over a few days of testing, I managed to discover quite interesting funnels with schematic traffic. Such approaches are still actively used and continue to work.
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