Meta Ad Library

The Meta Ad Library is a public database maintained by Meta that contains all ads currently running on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network. Anyone can search it — no Meta account required — making it one of the most powerful competitive intelligence tools available to marketers.

What You Can See

For each active ad, the Meta Ad Library shows:

• The ad creative — image, video, carousel, or collection
• Ad copy and headline — exact text as running
• CTA button type — Shop Now, Learn More, Sign Up, etc.
• Start date — when the ad began running
• Platforms — which Meta properties it’s serving on
• Active/inactive status
• For political ads — spend range and impression estimates

What it does not show: targeting parameters, audience size, spend amounts (for non-political ads), or performance metrics. You can see the creative but not the business data behind it.

Why It Matters for Competitive Research

The Ad Library lets you reverse-engineer a competitor’s creative strategy with more accuracy than any other tool. By looking at which ads have been running for months versus days, you can infer which creatives are performing — brands rarely keep spending on ads that don’t convert.

Key signals to look for:

• Longevity — an ad running for 60+ days is almost certainly profitable
• Volume — a brand running 200+ active ads is doing systematic creative testing at scale
• Format mix — the ratio of video to image to carousel ads reveals where they’re finding efficiency
• Copy patterns — recurring themes in headlines signal what messaging angle is resonating

Meta Ad Library in Practice: Data Spyglass

This publication uses scraped Meta Ad Library data as the primary source for all teardowns. Rather than manually browsing the library, we pull structured data to analyze brands’ complete active ad sets — counting creatives, categorizing formats, identifying top performers, and surfacing patterns that wouldn’t be visible from spot-checking a few ads manually.

How to Use It

Visit Meta Ad Library and search by advertiser name or keyword. Filter by country and platform. Sort by “Active” to see currently running ads only. There’s no login required, but creating a free account unlocks some filtering features.

For systematic competitive research, Meta also offers the Ad Library API for programmatic access — though it has rate limits and requires a developer account.