How to Use the Meta Ads Library to Research Competitors and Find Winning Creative

Key Takeaways

The Meta Ads Library is completely free and public. You don’t need a Facebook account to search it, and you don’t need to be running ads yourself.
Every active ad on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network is visible. If your competitor is running ads right now, you can see the exact creative.
The library shows creative, copy, call to action, platforms, and how long each ad has been live. It does not show spend, targeting, or performance data for commercial ads.
An ad that has been running continuously for 60 days or more is a strong signal it’s profitable. Advertisers don’t sustain losing creative.
Political and social issue ads have additional transparency data, including impression ranges and spend estimates, that ordinary commercial ads don’t get.
The library retains commercial ads for 90 days after they stop running, and up to 7 years for political and social issue campaigns.
Run length is the single most useful signal in the library. Everything else is context.

The Meta Ads Library is a free, publicly searchable database of every ad currently running on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network. No login required. You can look up any business in New Zealand or anywhere else in the world, search by keyword, and see the exact creative they’re serving, which platforms they’re running it on, and how long each ad has been live.

For NZ businesses, it’s one of the most practically useful free tools in paid advertising. Most people who discover it stop at the surface. This post is about what’s actually underneath.

What the Meta Ads Library is and how it came to exist

Facebook built the library in 2018 as a transparency measure for political advertising, following the Cambridge Analytica fallout and pressure from regulators in the US and EU. The original intent was simple: make it possible to see who was running political ads, what they said, and how much was being spent.

By 2019, Meta extended the library to cover all advertising on its platforms, not just political content. The result is a level of competitive transparency that doesn’t exist anywhere else in digital advertising. Google doesn’t offer anything comparable for Search. TikTok has a creative library, but it’s curated. Meta’s library is every ad, unfiltered.

You can access it at facebook.com/ads/library. No account required. No credit card. Just search.

Filter by country (set it to New Zealand for local research), by ad category (all ads, or specifically political and social issue campaigns), and by platform. Search by advertiser name or by keyword. The library returns active ads and, for commercial advertisers, recently stopped ads from the past 90 days.

How to search it properly

Search by advertiser name

If you know who you want to research, type their business name or Facebook Page name directly. For a plumbing company in Auckland, type the company name. For a law firm in Christchurch, same approach. The library returns all their currently active ads and often a selection of recently paused or finished creative too.

First move: look up your three closest direct competitors. Note which ads have been running longest. An ad from three months ago that’s still live today is almost certainly converting. Advertisers pause what isn’t working. The ads they leave running are the ones generating leads or sales.

Sort by “Oldest” to surface the long-runners. Those are the ones worth studying in detail.

Search by keyword

Type in a service term that describes what you sell. “Emergency electrician Auckland.” “Kitchen renovation Hamilton.” “Dental implants Christchurch.” The library returns every active ad across Meta that uses that phrase in the headline, body copy, or call to action.

This is where the research becomes genuinely valuable. You can see, across the whole NZ market or any specific region, what angles and messages are currently being used for any service category. Are competitors leading with price? Urgency? Warranties? Before-and-after results? Testimonials from local customers?

This kind of survey used to take months of manually browsing Instagram and making notes. The library compresses it into an afternoon.

Use the country filter

Always set the country filter explicitly. The library defaults to your IP location, which is usually right, but being explicit avoids noise from global campaigns. For most NZ research, set it to New Zealand. If you want to look at what overseas markets are testing in your category, change the country to Australia or the United States. Markets that are further ahead in paid advertising competition, especially the US, often surface creative formats and offer structures that haven’t been tested here yet.

Check the platform column

Each ad shows which Meta properties it runs on: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network. If a competitor runs heavily on Instagram and skips Facebook entirely, they have a reason. Maybe their audience skews younger. Maybe Facebook wasn’t producing leads that converted. You won’t know for certain without their data, but the distribution tells you something about where their customers actually engage.

What an ad’s run length tells you

This is the most underused signal in the library, and it’s the first thing I check when doing a competitive audit.

Commercial advertisers don’t have unlimited patience or budgets. An ad that’s been running for a week proves nothing. An ad that’s been running continuously for 60 days or more, without pausing or stopping, is almost certainly profitable. The advertiser has reviewed it multiple times and chosen to keep spending on it. That’s as close to a performance signal as the library gets.

When you find an ad from a competitor that launched in January and is still running in July, study it carefully. What is the offer? What is the hook? What format are they using? Is it a direct problem-solution message, a customer testimonial, a comparison against a competitor, or an educational piece that earns the click?

Run length is the library’s most honest metric. Everything else is context.

Creative formats and what they signal

If a competitor runs exclusively short-form vertical video, they’ve found video converts better for their audience than static. If they’ve recently switched from static images to carousels, something prompted that change, either they tested it and it won, or they hired someone who pushed them in that direction.

Format choices tell you what’s working at a category level. A roofing company in Auckland that runs four different testimonial video variations has found that testimonials outperform educational content. A legal firm running long-form copy in dark-background static ads knows their audience reads before they call. An e-commerce business cycling through carousel ads every two weeks is actively testing creative and refreshing against fatigue.

None of this tells you exactly what to make for your own account. It tells you what’s worth testing and what directions have already been validated in your market.

How political ads are different

For political parties, electoral candidates, and issues-based organisations, the Meta Ads Library shows data that commercial advertisers don’t get access to. This includes impression ranges showing how many people saw the ad in bands such as “100,000 to 200,000”, estimated spend ranges, demographic breakdowns of who the ad reached including age, gender, and regional distribution, and payer and disclaimer information.

If you’re ever auditing a political campaign, doing journalism, or researching how public issues are being communicated through paid media, these fields are genuinely detailed. The information is considerably more granular than anything available for commercial advertising.

This transparency gap exists because of the regulatory environment around political content. Meta built the commercial library as a side effect of the political transparency requirement. Useful, but limited by design for everyone outside the political category.

What the library won’t tell you

Four things look like they should be visible but aren’t.

Spend. You can see the creative. You cannot see what the advertiser is paying for it. A competitor running one ad could be spending $20 a day or $5,000 a day. The library gives you no way to know, and that’s deliberate.

Targeting. You cannot see who the ad is being served to. Age range, interests, lookalike audiences, geographic radius, exclusions. None of it is visible. All you see is the creative and the metadata around when and where it ran.

Performance. There’s no CTR, no CPM, no cost per lead, no conversion rate, no ROAS. The library is a creative database, not a performance database.

Audience size. Unless it’s a political ad with impression ranges, you don’t know if an ad was seen by 500 people or 5 million people.

The implication is important. Don’t assume a competitor’s ad is high-performing just because you can see it. It might be getting poor results and they haven’t paused it yet. It might be a test that hasn’t reached a conclusion. The run-length test remains your best proxy for whether something is actually working.

Practical uses for NZ service businesses

Research your offer before building any creative

Before writing a single line of ad copy for a new campaign, spend 30 minutes in the library looking at what’s already running in your category across New Zealand. A plumber, electrician, or HVAC business in Auckland should search their own service category and read every active ad.

What price points are being advertised? What guarantees are being made, fixed-price quotes, same-day service, satisfaction guarantees? What lead hooks are being used, free inspections, free quotes, limited-time discounts? What objections are being pre-empted in the copy?

If every competitor in your city is advertising same-day service as their point of difference, you need a different angle. If nobody is advertising a workmanship guarantee and you offer one, that’s a gap worth exploiting. The library tells you what the market conversation currently looks like. Your job is to find where you can stand out in it.

Spot creative fatigue in your competition

If you manage Meta ads for your own business, the library is a fast way to monitor whether competitors are refreshing their creative or running stale campaigns. Advertisers who haven’t changed creative in four months are almost certainly experiencing rising CPMs and falling performance. Creative fatigue is one of the most common causes of rising cost per lead in mature accounts.

A competitor running exhausted creative is an opportunity. Their audience has seen those ads dozens of times. If your creative is fresh and your offer is competitive, you’ll win a disproportionate share of attention at a lower CPM.

Find angles you haven’t tested yourself

Sometimes the best use of the library is discovering something a competitor is testing that hadn’t occurred to you. A physio clinic running a series of ads showing patient recovery progress over three weeks is testing a format built around transformation. A law firm running ads that open with a client’s outcome rather than the firm’s credentials is leading with proof rather than positioning.

You don’t copy the ad. You identify the underlying creative angle and test your own version with your own clients, your own story, your own numbers. The inspiration is legitimate. The execution is yours.

Audit your own ads against the competition

The library shows your own ads too. Search your business name and look at your active creative alongside what competitors are running. How does your messaging land when it’s sitting next to three other businesses making similar claims? If your offer looks generic compared to what’s in the market, that’s useful to know before you spend more budget on it.

Research before entering a new market

If you’re a Christchurch business considering expanding to Auckland, search your category in Auckland first. The competitive landscape might look very different. You’ll see who the dominant advertisers are, what they’re spending creative effort on, and where there might be gaps in the conversation. That’s a much better foundation for a new campaign than guessing what you’re up against.

A worked example for a Hamilton trades business

Say you’re a plumber in Hamilton wanting to run your first Meta ads campaign. Here’s what the library research might look like.

Search “plumber Hamilton” in the keyword field. Filter to New Zealand. You find five active advertisers. Three of them are running ads that lead with “No call-out fee.” One is running video showing a plumber arriving quickly at a house with a flooded bathroom. One is running a static ad with a five-star Google review as the headline.

The “no call-out fee” angle is saturated. Three businesses are making the same claim. The emergency response video has been live for four months, which suggests it’s converting. The Google review headline is a single ad launched two weeks ago with no history.

Your move: test the emergency response angle with your own footage, but lead with your unique point of difference. Maybe your team responds within 90 minutes in Hamilton. Maybe you offer a fixed price before you start, not after. The market research takes 20 minutes. The creative brief writes itself.

That’s the library in practice. Fast, free, and genuinely useful before you spend a dollar.

The Meta Ads Library API

For agencies or businesses doing systematic competitive research across large numbers of advertisers, Meta provides an API that lets you query the library programmatically.

The API requires a Facebook developer account and a registered app, but it’s free to use within Meta’s rate limits. You can pull ad data across advertisers, filter by country, category, and date range, and pipe it into your own dashboards or monitoring tools.

This is practical if you want to track 20 to 30 competitors over time rather than manually checking the library each week. For most NZ businesses running their own accounts, the manual interface at facebook.com/ads/library is sufficient. For agencies managing multiple clients in competitive verticals, the API removes a meaningful amount of repetitive work.

Making the library part of your regular process

The mistake most advertisers make is treating the library as a one-time visit. They search once, screenshot a handful of ads, and move on. That leaves most of the value behind.

Build it into your regular creative rhythm. Before every new creative sprint, before every monthly account review, before launching into a new category, spend 20 minutes in the library. Note what’s changed in the competitive set. See who’s launched new creative. Check which ads from last month have continued to run and which have stopped.

This discipline compounds over time. After six months of regular library checks, you have a detailed map of how the creative conversation in your category evolves. You know which angles have been tested and abandoned. You know which formats have sustained. You know which competitors are actively investing in creative and which are coasting on the same ad they launched at the start of the year.

That context makes every creative brief better. You’re building from evidence, not assumption.

Understanding why some creative sustains in the auction and other creative dies is a separate question from what the library shows you. The library reveals what’s being tested. How Meta’s algorithm actually decides which ad wins is the other side of the picture, and the two together give you a much sharper view of where to focus creative effort.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Meta Ads Library actually free? Yes, completely. It’s publicly accessible at facebook.com/ads/library with no account required, no login, and no cost. You can use it whether or not you run Meta ads yourself or even have a Facebook account.

Can I see how much my competitors are spending on Meta ads? No, not for commercial advertising. The library shows creative, platforms, and run dates for standard business ads, but spend is not disclosed. Political and social issue campaigns include estimated spend ranges as part of Meta’s transparency requirements for electoral content.

How long does the library keep ads after they stop running? Active ads are always visible. Commercial ads that have stopped are retained for 90 days after their last impression. Political and social issue ads are retained for up to seven years.

How can I tell if a competitor’s ad is actually working? Run length is the best proxy. An ad that has been running continuously for 60 days or more without pausing has almost certainly generated enough return to justify the spend. Advertisers don’t sustain losing creative for months. The longer an ad has been live, the stronger the signal that it’s profitable.

Can I use the library to research ads from other countries? Yes. Use the country filter to search any market. Researching what US or Australian advertisers are running in your category is a useful way to find creative formats and offer angles that haven’t been tested in New Zealand yet. Markets with higher ad competition tend to be further ahead in creative development.

If you want help building a Meta ads strategy informed by proper competitive research, working with someone who runs NZ campaigns rather than theorises about them, get in touch with our team. We run competitive creative audits and paid ads for NZ service businesses, trades, clinics, and professional firms across the country.