Writing a Facebook ad from scratch is a strange kind of blank page. You have 125 characters of primary text, a headline, an image, and a budget that starts burning the moment you press publish.
Most people write one, watch it underperform, and conclude that ads do not work for them. What they needed was to see fifty ads that did work before writing their own.
The idea: a Google Sheet full of real Facebook ad examples, broken down and made fillable. It is one of the 100 business ideas in Google Sheets on my list, and it is a good fit for anyone who already spends time looking at ads.
The idea
The sheet holds a collection of real-world Facebook ad examples. For each one, record the ad copy, a description or link to the image or video, the target audience as far as you can tell, the ad format, and any metrics you can honestly report. Ads from the public ad library are fair game, and you can note what you observe without inventing numbers.
Examples alone are useful. What makes the sheet valuable is the next step: create formats that are fillable by the user. Take the structure behind a good ad (a question, a promise, a proof point, a call to action) and turn it into a template with blanks. Let the user enter a few words specific to their industry and get a list of possible ads back. That is the moment the sheet stops being a reference and becomes a generator.
Then think about collaboration. Make a sheet that lets marketers work together, review and analyze the examples, and discuss strategies for creating successful ads. A small team can score each example, argue about why it worked, and draft their own ads in the same place. Half of ad strategy is taste, and taste develops faster in a group.
Keep the examples organized by industry and by what the ad is trying to do. A retargeting ad for an abandoned cart is a different animal from a cold awareness ad for a new brand, and a buyer wants to find the right animal fast.
The reason a sheet beats a folder of screenshots is the columns. Once every ad is broken into its parts, you can sort by format, filter by industry, and see patterns that are invisible in a pile of images.
How to build it in Google Sheets
- Examples tab. One row per ad: ID, Industry, Objective (awareness, traffic, conversion, retargeting), Format (image, video, carousel), Headline, Primary Text, Call to Action, Visual Description, Audience Notes, Why It Works, Source Link, Date Seen.
- Formats tab. The reusable structures. Name, Pattern with placeholders like {product} and {benefit}, and which example it came from.
- Generator tab. Input cells for Product, Audience, Main Benefit, and Offer. Below, every format filled in with those words, so the user gets a dozen draft ads at once.
- Review tab. Ad ID, Reviewer, Score, Comment, and a checkbox for Discussed. This is where the team works.
Features that fit:
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SUBSTITUTE powers the Generator.
=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(Formats!B2, "{product}", $B$2), "{benefit}", $B$4)fills one format, and ARRAYFORMULA down the column fills all of them. - Data validation dropdowns for Industry, Objective, Format, and Reviewer. Consistent values are what make the filtering usable.
- FILTER on a Browse tab, with two dropdowns at the top, so a buyer can see only conversion ads in their industry.
- Conditional formatting on the Review tab that colors scores from red to green, so the team's favorites stand out without a chart.
- Checkboxes for Discussed and for Saved to My Swipe, so each user can build their own shortlist inside the shared sheet.
- Protected ranges on the Examples and Formats tabs in the sold copy, so a team can review and generate without breaking the source rows.
Write the Why It Works column yourself, in your own words. It is the only column a competitor cannot copy.
Who pays for it, and how to sell it
Small business owners running their own ads. Freelance media buyers and small agencies who need to show clients options fast. In-house marketers who want a shared reference for the team. Each of those groups will pay for a pack focused on their industry.
They are paying for the curation, the breakdowns, and the generator. The examples save research time, the formats save writing time, and the review tab saves meeting time.
Pricing: sell industry packs one-time on Gumroad. Because ads go stale and new formats appear, a subscription that adds fresh examples every month is a sensible upgrade, and agencies will take it. A service on top is natural: a paid ad review, or writing a client's first ten ads from the Generator.
For the subscription, OnlySheets sells access to the live Google Sheet and shares it automatically with every buyer, so each month's new examples appear in everyone's copy without a resend.
First 10 customers: break down one ad a day in public for two weeks. Show the ad, show your columns, show why it works. People who run ads collect this kind of thing compulsively, and the ones who ask for the full sheet are your first ten.
Related ideas from the list
- Swipe File of Design Inspiration, the same swipe file mechanic for visual work instead of ad copy.
- Landing Page Design Breakdowns, which is where the click from a good ad ends up, and sells to the same marketer.
- Write Sales Copy, a fill-in-the-blanks copy tool that uses the same generator approach.
Want the other 99? This is one idea from my list of 100 business ideas you can build in Google Sheets. Get all 100 business ideas as a free Google Sheet.
And if you want to learn how to package and sell spreadsheets, my course Selling Spreadsheets walks through exactly that.
