Guide
Your competitors are running live experiments and publishing the results for free. Here's how to read them — the tools, what to look for, and the step most people skip that turns research into ads that actually win.
The Meta Ad Library and TikTok Creative Center are free, official, and comprehensive. Search a competitor by name to see every ad they're running right now. A paid spy tool adds faster search and saved swipe files, but start free.
A single ad tells you little. What's revealing is repetition: the hook angle a competitor keeps remaking, the format that dominates their account, the offer that recurs, and the ads that have run longest. Patterns point at what's working; collect them into a swipe file.
The tempting shortcut is "it's been running for months, so it must convert." Sometimes true, often not — ads coast on autopilot budget all the time. Run time is a hint, not evidence. This is the exact trap unpacked in how to tell if a competitor ad is working.
This is the step that turns spying into an edge. Take the competitor ads worth studying and score them for attention — Hook Strength, the drop-off second, a percentile against top performers. Now you know which are genuinely strong. Model those, build your version, and pre-test it before you spend, so you launch something you already know out-hooks the competitor you copied from.
Score the ads you find, then score yours before you spend. First analysis free.
Score an AdUse the official free libraries: the Meta Ad Library shows every active Facebook and Instagram ad by page, and the TikTok Creative Center surfaces top-performing TikTok ads. Search a competitor's name or your niche keywords to see their live creative, how many variants they run, and roughly how long each has been active.
Yes. These ads are public by design — the platforms built the libraries for transparency. Studying angles, hooks, and formats is standard competitive research, the same thing ad teardown channels do. The line is copying: borrow structure and strategy, not protected creative assets word-for-word.
Look for patterns: which hook angles a competitor repeats, which formats dominate, how long ads run, and which offers recur. Repeated and long-running creative hints at what's working. Then judge the creative itself — whether it holds attention — so you model genuine winners, not lucky reach.