How to see your competitors’ ads: a step-by-step guide to the public ad libraries

The ads your competitors are running right now are public. You do not need a paid tool or an inside contact: Meta and Google publish them in open libraries, and anyone can look them up for free, without an account, in about two minutes. Many advertisers do not know this, and the ones who do rarely use it.

This guide walks through the Meta and Google libraries step by step. And above all, the part that is usually missing: what to do with what you find.

What you can see and what you cannot

Start here, because there is a lot of inflated promise around this. These libraries came out of regulatory pressure, not as marketing tools: Meta launched its own in 2018, and Google expanded its own under the EU Digital Services Act. The goal is civic transparency, and that defines what they show.

• Yes: the full creative, the copy exactly as it runs, the format, how long it has been live and which platforms it runs on.
• Yes: how many different variants a brand is testing on the same concept.
• No: how much they spend. Commercial ads carry no spend or impression data; that only exists for political and issue ads.
• No: what targeting they use, except for ads served in the European Union, where the rules require it to be disclosed.
• No: what results they get. No conversion data is public.

Any tool promising you a competitor’s exact spend on Meta or Google is estimating it, not reading it. Useful as an order of magnitude; never as a fact.

Seeing someone else’s ads is easy. Reading them properly is what changes a strategy.

Meta: the Ad Library

It covers Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads and Audience Network. It is the richer of the two: it shows the creative as it appears, how many versions each ad has and the day it went live.

Step 1. Open it and pick the country

Open Meta’s Ad Library. No login is needed for commercial ads. The country comes first: the library filters by where the ad is shown, so if you sell in Argentina and leave the selector on the United States you will not see what matters to you. Set the category to “All ads” unless you are specifically after political content.

Step 2. Search by advertiser or by keyword

There are two routes, and they serve different purposes:

• By advertiser: type the brand name and see everything it has live. This is what you use when you already know who to watch.
• By keyword: search a term from your category and every advertiser using it in their copy shows up. This is what you use to find competitors you had not spotted.

The second route is the underrated one. Search the problem your product solves, not your product’s name: brands will surface that compete for the same need from an angle you had not considered.

Step 3. Narrow it with the filters

The “Filters” button narrows by language, platform, media type, status and dates. Sorting only offers most impressions or most recent first, so age is read on each card. Two combinations we always use:

• Active, checking each one’s “Started running on” date: an ad that has been running for months is the one working for that brand. Nobody keeps funding something that does not pay off.
• Inactive: what they tried and pulled. Just as informative as what survived, and almost nobody looks at it.

Step 4. Read the ad record

“See ad details” opens the record. Each ad shows the date it started running, the platforms it runs on and a library identifier. If it says it uses several versions, that is valuable: the brand is testing the same concept with different copy or images, and you can open each variant.

Google: the Ads Transparency Center

It covers Search, YouTube, Shopping, Maps and Google Play. It is more spartan than Meta’s, but it has something the other does not: it confirms the advertiser’s verified identity, because Google requires that verification before letting anyone run ads.

Step 1. Search for the advertiser

Open the Ads Transparency Center and type the brand name or its domain. No account needed here either. If the brand advertises under several legal entities you will get several records, and it is worth checking them all: the main account and a one-off promotion are often separate. If you search by domain, the page groups every account advertising that site and you can filter by advertiser.

Step 2. Filter by region, date and format

Region is picked at the top, next to the search box, and above the ads there are date, platform and format filters. Region matters for the same reason as on Meta. Date, to tell a seasonal campaign from a sustained one. And format (text, image or video) separates Search ads from YouTube and display ads: these are different strategies and are worth reading separately.

Step 3. Open an ad

Opening one shows the creative, the format and the last date it was shown; if it has variants, you step through them with the arrows. Search ads show the headlines and descriptions exactly as they run, which is direct material for reviewing your own.

There is a useful shortcut when you come across a live ad: its three-dot menu has an option to see more ads from that advertiser. And from any ad record, “See more ads by this advertiser” takes you to the rest.

What to look at once you have them

This is the difference between collecting screenshots and reaching a conclusion. The order we work in:

1. Longevity before volume. An ad that has been live four months says more than twenty launched this week: time on air is the only performance signal the library hands you.
2. The angle, not the asset. Are they competing on price, on guarantee, on delivery speed, on fear of getting it wrong? Understanding the angle shows you which space is still open.
3. The actual offer. Discount, free shipping, free trial, financing. It is the easiest thing to compare against yours and the one that moves the number most.
4. How many variants they test. A brand with fifteen versions of one concept has a testing process running. One with a single ad from six months ago does not.
5. Where they lead. Click through. The landing page says more than the ad: what they promise, what the form asks for, when they ask for it.
6. What they are not doing. The gap is the opportunity. If none of the five use vertical video, or none mention after-sales, there is room there.

Three mistakes worth avoiding

• Copying the creative. Beyond the legal problem, an ad that works for someone else is calibrated to their brand, their offer and their audience. What you borrow is the angle, never the asset.
• Assuming everything you see works. A large brand can fund months of mediocre advertising. Longevity is a strong signal, not proof.
• Looking only once. This pays off as a routine, not as an afternoon of research. A monthly pass over five competitors shows you the changes, and the change is what informs you.

How we handle it at Semcial

In every audit we go through the libraries for the competitors the client names, and also for the ones that surface on a keyword search, which almost always include someone they had not spotted. Out of that comes a map of angles and offers: who competes on what, with what promise, and for how long.

That does not define the strategy on its own, but it avoids the most expensive mistake at the start: going out saying exactly what five other brands already say, with a smaller budget and no clear reason for anyone to pick you.