The Meta Ad Library is the single most useful free tool in performance marketing, and most people use maybe a tenth of it. It's a public, searchable archive of every ad currently running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads. No login, no spend, no relationship with the advertiser required. You can type in a competitor's name and see, in seconds, exactly what creative they're putting money behind right now.
The catch is that the Ad Library shows you everything a page is running, with no ranking and no signal about what's working. Scroll a big advertiser and you'll see dozens of ads with no obvious way to tell the winners from the tests. This guide walks through how to search it properly, which filters actually matter, and the one reading trick (run-length) that turns an undifferentiated wall of ads into a ranked list of proven performers.
How to search the Meta Ad Library
Go to facebook.com/ads/library. Before you can search, the page asks you to pick a country and an ad category. Country matters. An advertiser's US ads and their UK ads can be completely different creative, so choose the market you actually care about. For category, leave it on "All ads" unless you're specifically researching housing, employment, credit, or political ads (those are archived under stricter rules and searched separately).
From there you have two ways in:
- Search by advertiser (page). Type a brand name and select their verified page. This shows every active ad that page is running, which is the cleanest way to study one competitor end to end.
- Search by keyword. Type a term like "creatine gummies" or "project management" and Meta returns ads from any advertiser whose copy mentions it. This is how you discover competitors you didn't know you had, and how you find the best creative in a category regardless of who made it.
Start with a known competitor by page to calibrate your eye, then switch to keyword search to widen the net. The keyword view is where the real discovery happens. You'll surface direct rivals, adjacent brands, and the occasional outsider running category-defining creative.
The filters that actually matter
Once results load, a handful of filters do most of the work:
- Platform. Filter to Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, or Threads to see where a competitor concentrates spend. A brand running almost everything on Instagram Reels is telling you where their audience is.
- Media type. Split image from video. If a category's top advertisers are overwhelmingly running video, that's a strong hint about what the platform is rewarding for that audience right now.
- Active vs inactive. The default view is active ads only, but you can view ads that have stopped running too. Inactive ads are a graveyard of tests that got cut, useful for seeing what a brand tried and abandoned.
- Date range / start date. Every ad card shows the date it started running. This is the most important number on the whole card, and the next section is entirely about why.
What the Ad Library deliberately does not give you is any performance metric. There's no spend, no impressions and no click-through for standard commercial ads. So you can't sort by "best." You have to infer it. That's where run-length comes in.
How to find winning ads for an app category
There is no app category filter in the Meta Ad Library. You cannot pick "fitness apps" or "budgeting apps" from a menu, and the category picker on the first screen only separates ordinary ads from housing, employment, credit and political ones. You get to an app category in three steps instead.
- Search by keyword, with the category and the word "app". Try "budget app", "meditation app" or "language learning app". Keyword search matches the words in the ad copy, so it returns every advertiser describing itself that way, including apps you had not heard of.
- Keep the ads that send people to a store. An app install ad carries a button like "Install now", "Use app" or "Play game", and its link goes to the App Store or Google Play. Ads with those buttons are the app advertisers; the rest are articles, courses and agencies using the same words.
- Filter to video, then sort your attention by run-length. App advertisers lean heavily on short video, and the ad that has been live for months is the one the app is confident installs pay for. Open that advertiser's page to see everything else they run.
Two other free libraries help here. TikTok's Creative Center has a Top Ads view that can be filtered by industry, which the Meta library cannot do. And the Google Ads Transparency Center shows the same advertiser's search and YouTube ads by domain. Hermoso's Ad Spy reads these libraries for you and ranks what it finds by how long each ad has run, and the app ad maker turns a winner into a version that shows your own app.
Run-length: the free winner signal
Here's the insight that changes how you read the entire library: how long an ad has been running is the closest thing to a public performance metric you'll get.
Advertisers kill losers fast. If an ad isn't returning on spend, it gets paused within days. Nobody keeps paying to run creative that doesn't convert. So an ad that has been continuously active for weeks or months is, by revealed preference, an ad the advertiser is confident makes money. They've had every incentive to turn it off and chose not to. Longevity is the market voting with a budget.
To read it, look at each ad's start date and do the subtraction against today. An ad that started three months ago and is still active is a proven winner in that account. An ad that started four days ago is a test. It might be great, but the brand doesn't know yet, and neither do you. When you're deciding which competitor ads to study and remix, sort your attention by run-length, not by whatever order Meta happens to show them in. The Meta Ad Library search does this subtraction for you and puts the longest runners first.
A few honest caveats: run-length is a strong signal, not a certainty. Brand-awareness ads sometimes run long for reasons unrelated to direct response. Very large advertisers occasionally leave evergreen creative up out of inertia. And the Ad Library shows a start date but doesn't always make total run duration obvious at a glance across a big account. But as a free heuristic for "what is this brand confident about," nothing else in the tool comes close. If you take one habit from this guide, make it this: let the long-runners tell you what to copy.
Turning what you find into your own ad
Studying the library is step one. The gap most people never cross is going from "I found a great competitor ad" to "I have my own version of it running." Manually, that means screenshotting the ad, reverse-engineering its structure (the hook, the angle, the pacing, the CTA) and then briefing a designer or shooting your own creative around it. It works, but it's slow, and by the time you ship, the trend has moved.
This is the part Hermoso automates. Its Ad Spy does the searching, filtering, and run-length reading for you: point it at a competitor or a category and it pulls their live ads from the Meta library (plus Google, LinkedIn, and organic TikTok), then ranks what it finds so the proven long-runners rise to the top instead of getting lost in the scroll. You skip the manual detective work and land straight on the ads worth learning from.
From there you can remix. Hermoso reads the structure of an ad you like and produces a finished version for your own product, with your brand, your product photo, your copy and CTA baked in, as an on-brand image or video ad ready to run. Under the hood it researches what's winning first, then routes across multiple top image and video models per job so you're never picking the tool. The free plan includes 250+ earnable free credits with no card required, so you can go from "I found a winner in the Ad Library" to "I have my own version" in one sitting. Try it on a competitor you already study, starting with the ad that's been running longest.
Frequently asked
Is the Meta Ad Library free to use?
Yes. It's a public archive at facebook.com/ads/library with no login, no cost, and no relationship with the advertiser required. Anyone can search every ad running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads in any country Meta operates in.
Can I see how much a competitor is spending on their ads?
Not for standard commercial ads. Meta only publishes spend and impression ranges for social-issue, electoral, and political ads. For everything else you infer performance indirectly, and the strongest free signal is how long an ad has been running.
Why does how long an ad has run matter?
Advertisers pause ads that don't return on spend, usually within days. So an ad that has stayed continuously active for weeks or months is, by revealed preference, one the advertiser is confident is profitable. They had every incentive to turn it off and didn't. Longevity is the closest thing to a public performance metric the Ad Library offers.
How do I find competitors I don't already know about?
Search by keyword instead of by page. Typing a category term returns ads from any advertiser whose copy mentions it, which surfaces direct rivals, adjacent brands, and outsiders running strong category creative you'd never have thought to look up.
Can I filter the Meta Ad Library by app category?
No. The library has no category filter for apps. Search by keyword with the category and the word "app", keep the ads whose button says "Install now", "Use app" or "Play game" and whose link goes to the App Store or Google Play, then rank them by how long they have been running.
How does Hermoso use the Meta Ad Library?
Hermoso's Ad Spy pulls a competitor's or category's live ads from the Meta library (plus Google, LinkedIn, and organic TikTok) and ranks them so the proven long-runners surface first. You can then remix any ad into a finished, on-brand version for your own product, with your brand, product photo, copy, and CTA baked in.
Related
The same walkthrough for the other two free libraries: how to use the Google Ads Transparency Center (Search, YouTube, Shopping, Maps and Play) and how to use the LinkedIn Ad Library (B2B ads, with impressions and targeting for some of them).
Want it done for you? The ad spy tool reads all three and ranks what it finds by run length.
Hermoso does the Ad Library legwork for you. It pulls competitor ads, ranks the long-runners, and remixes them into finished ads for your product. The free plan has 250+ earnable free credits with no card required.
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