How to spy on your competitors' ads in the Meta Ads Library
In short
- The Meta Ads Library is public: you can see every active ad from any page without an ad account and without following the brand.
- Search by page, not by keyword, if you want a competitor's full catalogue.
- The «running since» date and the number of variants sharing one copy are the two fastest signals of what is working for them.
Meta publishes every active ad from every page as a transparency requirement. That means your competitor's entire ad catalogue is available, free, with no login, and without them knowing.
Access is not the problem: the interface is built for looking up one ad at a time, not for systematic research. This is the workflow that actually holds up.
What is the Meta Ads Library?
It is a public repository of every ad currently running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads. It shows the creative, the copy, the platforms it runs on and how long it has been active. For political and social-issue ads it also shows spend and reach data.
How to find a competitor's ads, step by step
How to read an ad card
Each card carries more information than it looks. Here is what to watch:
| Data point | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Running since | The strongest signal. An ad live for months is paying for itself. |
| «X ads use this creative and text» | They are scaling that creative across ad sets. Almost certainly a winner. |
| Platforms | If it only runs on Instagram Reels, the creative was built for vertical. |
| Library ID | The unique ID. Use it to come back to that exact ad later. |
| Multiple versions | They are testing copy or creative variants on the same base. |
The bottleneck: saving what you find
This is where research dies. Meta will not let you download the creative: right-click does nothing on the video, and a screenshot gives you a cropped, pixelated image instead of the original file.
The manual workaround is screen recording, or digging the file out of the browser inspector, renaming everything by hand and filing it. That is several minutes per ad, which is why almost nobody sustains it past two weeks.
AdVault adds a download button inside each Library card: you get the original file —video, image or the full carousel— already named by brand and date. It is free and runs entirely in your browser.
Common mistakes
- Searching by keyword when you want a brand. You will get third-party ads mentioning the term and miss the real catalogue.
- Filtering the wrong country. A brand may run 3 ads in your country and 200 in the US. If you want inspiration, look at the big market.
- Saving only the creative. Without the copy and the landing page, in two weeks you will not remember why you saved it.
- Mistaking «many ads» for «good ads». Volume is not performance: look at longevity, not count.
Do this research in half the time
AdVault downloads creatives from Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn and captures full landing pages. Free and 100% local.
Add to Chrome — free