Foreplay alternative for Meta ads

Almost everything above is about the market's ads: what other advertisers are running, how long they have run it, what their landing pages look like. That is a genuinely useful thing to know and it is what Foreplay is for.

HypeCrowd reads one thing: the ads already running in your own Meta ad account, and what each of them earned there. It has no view of anyone else's ads, and it never will.

Foreplay's pricing page lists "Competitor Benchmarking Data", and their Lens page offers to "compare your analytics to over 20,000+ advertisers". A benchmark tells you where you sit against other people.

We do not benchmark. A HypeCrowd verdict is measured against the cost per purchase you set, and nothing else. Winner means it cleared your target. Underperformer means worse than your own account's typical. When nothing has cleared your target yet, the product says "best in your account, none at target yet" rather than promoting the least bad ad.

• Awareness stage. Every ad is placed on the stage of awareness it argues to, from problem aware through to most aware. Most accounts discover they are talking almost entirely to people who already know the product, and that the money is somewhere else.
• The combinations you have never run. A grid of stage against format, with your spend in each cell. The empty cells are the ones your account has never tested, which is a fact about your account and never a claim about the market.
• The prediction ledger. When the product tells you something will help, it writes that down and later scores itself against what happened. If it has not made enough calls on your account yet, the page says so instead of showing a number.

The ad is read in segments, and the watch line from your own account sits directly underneath, with the product moment marked. The question stops being "which ads did well" and becomes "which second did people leave on, and what was on screen when they did".

On the Foreplay pages we read, we found no retention or drop-off analysis published at all: zero mentions of retention, drop-off, hook rate or thumbstop across their pricing and Lens pages. That is what we found, not a claim about what their product contains.

Pick Foreplay

If you want a swipe file, a searchable library of other people's ads, competitor tracking, or something that drafts scripts. If you work across more platforms than Meta. If you want white-labelled client sharing. If price is the deciding factor, because they start at a third of ours with no spend cap. That is most people, and it is not a consolation prize.

Pick HypeCrowd

If you already know what the market is running and still cannot say why your own ads won. If you want the verdict measured against your own target rather than against 20,000 other advertisers. If you want to see which second people left on. If you want the tool to keep a record of its own calls and show you how they turned out.