BlogResearch
How to see the Meta ads your competitors are running
Meta publishes every ad running in the EU, and most founders never look. Here is where they are, what you can read off them, and the one number that means something.
Gal Grošelj4 min read
Your competitor's ad budget is not a secret. Every ad running on Facebook and Instagram in the EU is published in a searchable library, as Meta's post on the Digital Services Act explains, and you can see it there for as long as the ad runs.
Most founders have never opened it. The ones who have usually opened it once, scrolled a wall of thumbnails, and closed it again, because a wall of thumbnails is not research.
Where to see a competitor's Meta ads
Meta's help page on the Ad Library says anyone can view and search it, and you need no account to look. Search a brand name and you get every ad that brand is running right now, in every country it runs them.
The same page lets you filter by country, which matters more than it sounds: an ad running in Germany is often a different offer from the same brand's ad in France, and the version you should be reading is the one running where you sell.
What you can read off an ad
The creative itself, in full, at the size the buyer sees it. The headline, the hook, the offer, the shape it was cut to.
The date it started running. This is the number nearly everybody scrolls past, and it is the most useful thing on the page.
For some ads in the EU, a reach figure Meta discloses. It is a disclosure number rather than a score, so treat it as a hint that an ad is being pushed, never as proof that it worked.
What you cannot read, and nobody can
Spend, clicks, conversions or return. For the ads a store runs, Meta publishes none of them, to anybody.
Any tool that claims to show you a competitor's results is guessing, and a guess printed as a number is worse than no number, because you will act on it.
So the honest version of competitive research is narrower than the pitch you usually hear, and still worth doing.
Time is the signal
An ad that has been running for ninety days is an ad somebody has kept paying for. Nobody keeps paying for an ad that does not work.
That is the closest thing to a public scoreboard this industry has, and it costs nothing to read. Sort what you find by how long it has been live, and the top of that list is the market telling you which angles are earning their place.
The ads that appeared last week are noise. The ones that have survived a quarter are the argument.
What to do with what you find
Do not copy the execution. Copying a competitor's ad gets you their creative and their positioning, and their positioning is aimed at their buyer.
Read the angles instead. Write down what each surviving ad is actually promising, and you will usually find four or five brands promising the same three things.
The gap in that list is your campaign. If every sleep supplement in the market leads on falling asleep faster and nobody is selling the evening ritual, the ritual is open, and it is open because nobody looked.
Doing it without the manual work
Reading one competitor by hand is an afternoon. Reading the twelve brands you actually compete with, in three countries, every month, is a job nobody does twice.
Nomi keeps that pass running. It holds the live ads of the brands you name, counts how long each one has been up, and writes your campaign against what is running beside yours rather than from a blank page.
