See every ad your competitors are running
Your competitors publish their entire creative strategy in the Meta Ad Library. Almost nobody reads it properly. Doing so is the cheapest creative research available.
The Ad Library is a free window into what actually works
Every advertiser on Meta has their live ads visible in the public Ad Library. That means the hooks, the offers, the formats, the angles and roughly how long each has been running are all observable. An ad that has been live for months is almost certainly working, because nobody keeps paying to run a loser. That signal is free, and most brands never systematically look at it.
Competitor ad research turns that raw library into a decision. Which angles does your category over-use, so you can avoid the sea of sameness? Which formats do the biggest spenders run? Where is the gap nobody is claiming? I go through the full ad set for your named competitors, categorise everything, and come back with a creative brief you can hand straight to a designer or editor.
What the research covers
Full library sweep
Every live ad from each named competitor pulled and catalogued, not just the handful that surface on a first scroll.
Angle and hook analysis
What promise each ad leads with, categorised so you can see which angles saturate the category and which are open.
Format and production read
Static versus video, UGC versus studio, length and production level, and what the heavy spenders lean on.
Longevity signals
Which creatives have been running longest, which is the closest public proxy for what is actually performing.
Offer and promotion mapping
Discount depth, bundles, subscription pushes and guarantees, so your offer is not quietly the weakest in the set.
Creative brief output
A prioritised brief of concepts to produce, written so a designer or editor can start on it immediately.
How the research runs
Define the set
We agree the competitor list: direct rivals, category leaders, and one or two adjacent brands worth stealing from.
Pull and catalogue
I sweep the Ad Library for each brand and log every live creative with its angle, format and run length.
Find the gaps
Cluster the results to show what the category over-uses, what the winners repeat, and what nobody is saying.
Brief the work
A ranked set of concepts to produce next, tied to the gap each one exploits.
Why this beats guessing at creative
Creative is the single biggest lever in paid social, and most brands brief it from intuition. This replaces the guess with observation:
- You stop producing the same angle everyone in your category already runs.
- Long-running competitor ads tell you what is working without spending to learn it.
- Your offer gets benchmarked against what buyers are actually being shown.
- The output is a brief, not a report, so it turns into ads instead of a slide deck.
- It pairs directly with my free ad audit tool if you want a fast scored read first.
Common questions
How many competitors should I include?
Usually five to eight. Enough to see real category patterns without diluting the analysis. I would rather go deep on your genuine rivals plus a couple of category leaders than skim twenty brands.
Can you tell how much a competitor is spending?
Not precisely. The Ad Library does not publish spend for standard commercial ads. What it does give you is volume, variety and run length, which together are a reliable directional read on where the money is going.
Does this cover TikTok and Google too?
Meta is the richest public source by a wide margin, so it anchors the work. TikTok has its own creative library and Google has an ads transparency centre, and I fold both in when your competitors are active there.
Is this a one-off or ongoing?
Either. A one-off sweep is the right start. Brands in fast-moving categories often keep it running quarterly so the creative pipeline stays ahead of what everyone else is testing.
Free resources: How to see competitor ads for free · Liquid Death Meta ads, counted
Find out what you are up against
Send me your brand and three competitors and I will show you what they are running and where the gap is.
30 minutes · No obligation · I come prepared
