Every ad your competitors run on Facebook and Instagram is public. No paid tool or account needed: Meta publishes them all in a database anyone can search, the Ad Library.
Finding them is the easy part. This guide goes further: how to find a competitor even when their Page doesn't carry their name, discover the ones you don't know yet, spot the ads that really make them money, and keep them before they disappear.
Where to see a competitor's ads
Everything happens in the Meta Ad Library, at facebook.com/ads/library. It lists every active ad on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Meta's Audience Network.
Three settings before you search:
- The country: choose the one where your competitor sells. It's preselected, and it's the number one reason a brand “doesn't show up”.
- The category: “All ads”.
- The search: the competitor's name, or a keyword if you're looking for competitors you don't know.
The complete guide to the tool, filters and reading ad details included, is in our article on the Meta Ad Library. Here, we focus on a single goal: spying on a competitor effectively.
Step 1: find the competitor's Page
When you type a name, the library suggests Pages in a dropdown list. Click the Page rather than submitting the search: you get all of its ads at once, instead of the ads that simply contain that word.
If the brand doesn't show up, it's often because its Page has a different name. Three ways to find it:
- From its Facebook Page. The “Page transparency” section gives direct access to its ads in the library.
- From its website. The link to its Facebook Page or its Instagram account, often in the footer, gives you the exact name to search for.
- By its domain name. Many ads show the site's address in their copy: a keyword search on the domain often brings up the right Page.
Also think about brands that advertise from several Pages: one Page per country, one Page per product line, or the Page of a partner creator. If a well-known brand seems to have few ads, it's often because part of them runs elsewhere.
Step 2: discover the competitors you don't know
Your most dangerous competitors aren't always the ones you're watching. To widen the net:
- Search by product keyword, not by brand: “hair serum”, “insulated water bottle”, “yoga mat”. You'll see every brand that mentions it in its ads, including foreign brands targeting your market.
- Change country. An idea that works in the United States or Germany often lands in other markets a few months later.
- Look at your own feed. Every “Sponsored” ad from a brand in your niche is a lead. Its name is all you need to find it in the library.
Step 3: spot the ads that work
The library shows neither sales nor budget. But three clues give away the ads that make money.
| Clue | Where to see it | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Running time | Start date in the ad details | Beyond three or four weeks, the ad is profitable: nobody pays for a creative that loses money |
| Same visual duplicated | Number of ads that use the same creative | The brand is putting more budget behind a creative that works |
| Several versions | The multiple versions label | The brand is testing hooks on a visual that already works |
Running time is the most reliable signal. An ad launched three days ago teaches you nothing: it may be failing as we speak. An ad that has been running for two months has survived dozens of kill decisions.
Also look at the landing page. The ad's link often leads to a product page or a dedicated sales page: that's where you see the offer, the price and the selling points the brand considers most effective.
Step 4: save the ads before they disappear
This is the step almost everyone skips, and the one that costs the most.
The library shows the present moment. When a competitor cuts an ad, it leaves the active results. And the images are served from temporary addresses: a link copied today will show nothing in a few days.
Two options:
- By hand: screenshots filed in a folder, with the start date and the brand name. It works, as long as you keep up the pace.
- With the CreaFlow AI Chrome extension: a button appears on every ad in the library. One click saves it to CreaSpy, your ad monitoring space, with the visual stored permanently. The extension is free.
In CreaSpy, you find everything you've saved, sorted by running time, which the Meta Ad Library can't do. You can also follow a brand: its new ads are recorded automatically, without going back through the library.
What about Instagram?
There is no separate library for Instagram. Instagram ads are in the same library as Facebook ads: simply set the platform filter to Instagram to see only what runs there.
That's useful because brands don't always do the same thing there. A creative designed for the Instagram feed doesn't have the same layout as a Facebook ad: if you produce for Instagram, compare like with like.
What you will never be able to see
To avoid false expectations, the library doesn't show:
- the budget spent, except for political ads;
- the results: no sales, no clicks, no cost per purchase;
- the targeting: age, interests, audiences.
For ads shown in the European Union, Meta displays a total reach, the number of accounts reached. It's a clue to the scale of delivery, not to its profitability: an ad can be widely seen and sell nothing.
Going from your competitor's ads to your own ad
Spotting a good ad is useless until you've made your own version of it. That's where most monitoring efforts stop: you pile up screenshots, and you produce nothing.
With CreaFlow AI, every saved ad has a “Clone” button. The tool analyzes its structure, the angle, the promise, the layout, then regenerates it with your product, your brand and your selling points. No element of the original visual is reused: it's the idea that gets reused, not the image.
You can also let the tool do the monitoring for you: name your competitors, or let it find them from your store, and choose among their active ads the ones you want to adapt. The full method is covered in cloning competitor ads, and the static ad formats help you spin the same idea out in several ways.
Guide written in September 2026. The Meta Ad Library is a service of Meta Platforms, publicly accessible free of charge; the brands mentioned belong to their respective owners.