Meta Ad Library: how to see competitors' Facebook ads

What the Meta Ad Library is

The Meta Ad Library is Meta's public archive of the ads running on Facebook, Instagram and Meta's other placements. It's free, and you don't need an ad account to search it. Every active ad is in there, including your own.

For ads shown in the EU, Meta also keeps the ad for a year after it last ran and shows who it targeted by age, gender and country, and how many people in the EU it reached. That's a result of the EU's Digital Services Act, and it makes the library far more useful for EU markets than for the US.

How to search

Pick a country and search for a brand name or a word that appears in the ads. Search by name and you get suggestions for matching pages, so you can look at one advertiser at a time. Filters let you choose platform, media type, active or all ads, and a date range.

Each ad shows when it started running and whether several versions use the same creative. Those two details tell you the most.

What to look for

How long an ad has run. An ad that's still running after two or three months almost always pays off. Nobody keeps a loser running that long. Start there when you want to understand what works for a competitor.

How many ads are active. Ten new ads a week means they test creative systematically. Two ads that have run since spring means the opposite. Both tell you something about how hard you'll have to compete.

The angle, not the design. Note which problem the ad opens with, what offer it makes and which page it sends people to. Those are the choices worth learning from. Don't copy the layout itself.

What the library doesn't show

You can't see what a competitor spends or how their ads perform. Spend is only shown for ads about politics, elections and social issues. The reach figures for EU ads hint at scale, but not at results.

So use the library to understand angles and testing pace, not to guess budgets. The best answer to whether an angle works for you is still to test it in your own account.