Guide
Facebook and Instagram are the most transparent ad platforms there is — every active ad is public. Here's how to find competitor creative, which tools are worth paying for, and how to tell which of the ads you find are actually working.
Meta's official Ad Library shows every ad any page is currently running on Facebook and Instagram — free, no login required. Search a competitor's name and you can see their entire active creative rotation, how many variants they're testing, and roughly how long each has run. For most research, this is all you need.
Paid spy tools — AdSpy, Foreplay, BigSpy — sit on top of the same public ads but add faster keyword and niche search, engagement filters, and saved swipe files. If you research at volume or want to organize inspiration by angle, they save real time. If you're checking a handful of competitors, the free library is enough. See the full landscape in ad spy tools.
The most common mistake: assuming a long-running ad is a winner. Sometimes it is; often it's just an ad on autopilot budget that nobody turned off. The Ad Library can tell you an ad exists and roughly how long it's run — never why it works or whether it holds attention past the first second.
Once you've found competitor ads worth studying, score them for attention: Hook Strength, the drop-off second, and a percentile against top performers tell you which are genuinely strong and worth modeling. Then test your own version before you spend — see Facebook ad creative testing and how to tell if a competitor ad is working.
Score any competitor ad for attention before you model it. First analysis free.
Score an AdThe free Meta Ad Library is the best starting point — it's official and shows every active Facebook and Instagram ad by page. For faster search, niche filtering, and saved swipe files, paid tools like AdSpy, Foreplay, and BigSpy add convenience on top of the same underlying public ads.
Yes. Facebook ads shown in the Meta Ad Library are public by design — Meta built the library for transparency. Studying competitor creative for research and inspiration is standard practice, the same thing ad teardown channels do. Just don't copy protected assets outright; borrow structure and angle, not the exact creative.
The Ad Library shows how long an ad has run, which is a weak proxy — long-running ads aren't always winners. To judge the creative itself, analyze whether it holds attention: its hook strength and where engagement drops. That tells you whether an ad is worth modeling, which run-time alone can't.