How to use the Facebook Ad Library, step by step
The Meta Ad Library is a public, searchable list of every ad running on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network. Meta built it for transparency, but it's also the easiest way to see what your competitors are running right now. Here's how to use it.
- Pick a country.Choose where your customers are. “All countries” works, but a single country shows you the ads your own customers actually see.
- Search a brand or a keyword.Searching a competitor's name shows their ads. Searching a keyword, like “meal prep” or “roof repair”, shows ads from everyone in your market, including competitors you didn't know about.
- Filter to active ads.Ads that are running today are the ones the advertiser still pays for. That's what you want to learn from.
- Open the advertiser's page. Click an advertiser to see all of their ads together. Look for patterns: the same offer repeated, the same style of image, the same opening line.
- Save the ones worth studying. Copy the text into the teardown above to get the hook, angle and offer spelled out, plus ideas for your own version.
What you can and can't see
For every active ad you can see the image or video, the text, the call-to-action button, the date it started running, and which Meta platforms it appears on. You can also see how many versions of an ad the advertiser is running.
What you can'tsee for normal ads is the money. Budget, spend, clicks and sales stay private. Meta only shows spend and reach ranges for political and social issue ads, and some extra audience details for ads shown in the European Union and the UK. So be wary of any tool that claims to show a competitor's exact results: at best it's an estimate.
How to tell which competitor ads are working
Without spend data you have to read the signals. Three matter most:
- Run time. Advertisers turn off ads that lose money. An ad that has been running for 30 days or more is very likely profitable. One that started this week tells you much less.
- Number of versions. When you see the same idea in five or ten slightly different versions, the advertiser is testing and scaling something that works.
- Repetition over time.If an offer (“free consultation”, “first box 50% off”) keeps coming back in new ads, it's the offer that sells, not the picture.
Once you know what's working, don't copy it. Take the hook, the angle and the offer and ask: how would this sound coming from my business, to my customers? That's what the teardown's “3 ideas” are for.
Do you need a paid ad spy tool?
Paid tools like BigSpy, Minea, AdSpy and Foreplay cost from about $9 to $149 a month. They add better search filters, saved swipe files and engagement estimates, which is useful for agencies and ecommerce brands studying hundreds of ads a week. If you just want to keep an eye on a handful of competitors, the free Ad Library is enough. Check it once a week, note the ads that keep running, and use them as inspiration.
The harder part is turning that inspiration into your own ad and getting it live without fighting Ads Manager. That's what AdChat does: you describe what you want in plain English, it writes the ad, and it creates it paused in your account when you say yes.