How can I see my competitors' Facebook ads?

You can see your competitors’ Facebook and Instagram ads in the Meta Ad Library at facebook.com/ads/library. The library is free, and you don’t need to log in. It shows every active ad any company is running on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network.

How to use the Ad Library

Searching is straightforward:

1. Go to facebook.com/ads/library.
2. Choose your country and set the ad category to “All ads”.
3. Type the company or brand name into the search field.
4. Open the company’s page to see every ad it’s running right now.

Each ad shows the full creative: images, videos, copy, and headlines. You’ll also see when the ad started running and which Meta platforms it appears on. A single ad often has several versions with different copy or images, and those are listed separately too.

You can also reach the library straight from a company’s Facebook page through the Page transparency section.

What the Ad Library tells you and what it doesn’t

The library shows you which products and offers a competitor is pushing, which formats it uses, and how many versions it’s testing its messages with. The start date is a useful clue: an ad that’s been running for months is probably profitable, because few companies keep funding advertising that loses money.

Budgets and results stay hidden. You can’t see how much a competitor spends, what a click costs, or how many ads lead to a sale. That’s why you shouldn’t copy a competitor’s ads as they are: you only see what’s being tried, not what’s working.

The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) added more transparency to the library in 2023. For ads shown in the EU, you now also see targeting details such as age, gender, and location, plus an estimate of how many people the ad reached. For political and social issue ads, Meta additionally publishes a range for the money spent.

How to use these findings in your own advertising

The Ad Library works best as a regular benchmarking tool, not a one-off peek. Go through your top competitors’ ads quarterly, for example, and note three things: which offers and angles they use, which ads have run the longest, and which formats they favor.

Turn your findings into differences, not copies. If every competitor leads with price, an ad that repeats the same message blends into the crowd and costs you more for nothing. The library’s most valuable insight is often what nobody is saying yet.

You can still borrow structural lessons from long-running ads for your own tests: the style of the hook, the length of the video, how the offer is framed. Test those lessons on your own audience and your own data, because a competitor’s audience isn’t the same as yours.

We’ll help you build Meta advertising that stands out from your competition as part of paid social.