How to See Competitor Ads on Facebook and Make Your Own Version

Short answer: open the Meta Ad Library, choose a country and All ads, and search the competitor's Facebook Page name. You'll see every ad they are running right now on Facebook, Instagram and Meta's other apps, with the date each one started. The ones running for months are your shortlist. Break each down into hook, format, beats, offer and proof, then rebuild that structure for your own product with your own footage and claims.

We build AdGraam, which can track competitors' ads and rebuild a winning format for your product. The steps below work with nothing but a browser.

How to see a competitor's ads in the Meta Ad Library

The Ad Library is Meta's public archive of ads. It is free and you don't need to log in.

1. Open the library at facebook.com/ads/library.
2. Choose a country. Pick the market you sell in, or All to see everything.
3. Set the ad category to All ads, so the search isn't limited to ads about social issues, elections or politics.
4. Search the Page name. Type the brand and pick its Page from the suggestions. Ads run from Facebook Pages, and the Page name doesn't always match the brand, so check for regional Pages and sub-brands too.
5. Filter. Narrow by active status, platform, media type (image or video), language and a date range.
6. Open the details. Each ad shows when it started running, which platforms it runs on and whether it has multiple versions.

Another route: on any brand's Facebook Page, the Page transparency section links straight to that Page's ads in the library.

If you don't know who your competitors are yet, search a product keyword such as "cotton bedsheets" instead of a brand name, and note which Pages keep appearing.

What the Ad Library won't show you

For ordinary commercial ads, Meta doesn't publish:

• Spend or budgets. Spend ranges appear only for ads about social issues, elections or politics.
• Results. No clicks, sales, ROAS or cost per purchase.
• Targeting, except for ads delivered in the EU, which also show an estimated reach and the age, gender and location targeting the advertiser chose.

So the library tells you what a competitor is running and for how long, not how well it is doing. You have to infer that.

How do you tell which competitor ads are working?

There are three useful signals, none of them proof:

• Runtime. An ad that has been active for 60 or 90 days is probably paying for itself, because brands rarely keep funding a loser. Check the start date on every active ad and look at the oldest ones first.
• Versions. "This ad has multiple versions", or the same video showing up in several ads, usually means it is being scaled or tested across audiences.
• Repetition. When a brand reshoots the same format for product after product, that format is working for them.

Watch for false positives. Brand awareness ads, catalog ads and retargeting ads can run for months without being their best performers. Look for patterns across several ads rather than trusting one.

Recent launches are worth a look too: they show what the brand is testing now.

How to break down a competitor's ad

Write a one-page breakdown for every ad on your shortlist. These are the parts that matter:

After five or six breakdowns you'll see the formats a category keeps paying for. That is the part worth borrowing.

What can you copy, and what can't you?

Fine to borrow: the format, the beat structure, the pacing, the type of angle (problem and solution, myth versus fact) and the length.

Never reuse: their footage, photos, faces, voice, music, logo, product names, exact script or on-screen text, and their claims or reviews. Footage, images, music and scripts are generally protected by copyright and names and logos by trademark law, while formats and ideas generally are not. If you want to name a competitor in a comparison ad, keep every claim factual and provable, and check with a lawyer. This is general guidance, not legal advice.

The practical test: if a viewer could mistake your ad for theirs, you copied too much.

How to recreate a winning format for your product

1. Pick one long-running ad whose format suits your product.
2. Write its beat sheet from your breakdown, with timings.
3. Swap every piece of content for yours: your product, your proof, your offer, your call to action.
4. Make new footage with your own cast or creator, or with AI.
5. Rewrite the hook for your audience instead of echoing theirs.
6. Test it against your current best ad, and judge it on hook rate, hold rate and cost per purchase.

Do you need a competitor ad spy tool?

Not to start. The Ad Library does the core job for free. Paid tools save ads before they disappear from the library, let you search across many brands and alert you when a competitor launches something new. They are worth it when you track many competitors or need an archive your team can share.

Where does AdGraam fit? (We build it)

AdGraam covers the research and the rebuild:

• Competitor tracking. Follow a competitor's Meta ad library inside AdGraam and see how many days each ad has been running. You can follow one competitor without connecting Meta, and up to ten once your Meta ad account is connected.
• Free Ad Library. The AdGraam Ad Library is a dated snapshot of saved Facebook and Instagram ads from D2C and consumer brands, with AI notes on each ad's hook, angle and offer.
• Rebuild a video ad. Copy Ads takes a link from the Meta Ad Library, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or YouTube, or an uploaded file up to 60 seconds long, and breaks it into beats. Your claims, packshots and logo come only from your product page. It pixelates the reference faces before storyboards are drawn, films new footage with a new cast, and its final check flags copied faces or the competitor's brand. You start each stage yourself (analysis, storyboards, a draft and the final 720p video), and each one shows its price first.
• Rebuild a static ad. The Creative Generator has a Clone a Competitor intent: add their ad as a reference and get a new ad built around your product, your brand colors and your logo.

Pricing: sign up free with no credit card, and accounts created with a work email get free credits. Every Copy Ads stage shows its price before you start it, and a failed stage is refunded.

The bottom line

Your competitors' longest-running ads are free market research. Use the Meta Ad Library to find them, break them down into parts, and rebuild the format, never the content, for your own product. Then let your own results decide whether the format works for you.

Start free and rebuild your first competitor format with the free credits, or book a 15-minute demo. For more formats to try, see our list of Meta ad creative ideas.