Before you spend anything on Facebook or Instagram, there is one free piece of information almost nobody uses properly: the full list of ads your competitors are running right now. It is public, it is called the Meta Ad Library, and it requires no ad account, no budget and no paid tool.
Most advertisers open it, glance at three creatives, and close the tab. That is a waste, because the real value is not in the creatives you see. It is in what you count.
What the library actually holds
Meta publishes every ad currently running across its platforms, for every advertiser and every industry. You can search by page name or by keyword.
For ads delivered in the European Union, the transparency requirement goes considerably further. Meta states that these ads stay visible while active and are then archived for one year after their last impression. Each ad shows its start date, the platforms it appears on, an estimate of total impressions in the EU, and targeting and reach information broken down by age and region. The full scope is documented in Meta's Transparency Center.
In other words: for a European competitor, you can see how long an ad has been running. That is the single most useful field in the entire library, and it is the one people look at least.
Run time is the only performance signal you get
Nobody keeps an unprofitable ad running for six months. An ad that has been live for a long time has probably cleared some profitability bar, at least in the eyes of whoever is paying for it.
The reverse is also true. An advertiser stacking twenty creatives launched in the same week is not necessarily winning. They are testing. And twenty ads that all went live on a Monday and disappeared a fortnight later tell the opposite story.
Reading the library by date changes the question you ask it. You stop asking which ad looks good, and start asking which one survived.
Count what is missing, not just what is there
The second use is less obvious, and it produces the better angles.
When we prepare a campaign, we systematically pull every active ad in a market and then look for what is not there. Across a sample of more than seven hundred French wedding photography ads, not one sent people into a WhatsApp conversation. Across more than thirteen hundred travel photography ads in Paris, not one sold the early morning slot, even though a photographer in that same market charges a premium for it on her own website.
An empty slot is not automatically an opportunity. Sometimes nobody does a thing because it does not work. But an empty slot in a market where everyone repeats the same promise is worth testing, precisely because the test costs one creative.
What the library will never tell you
Be clear about the limits, or you will draw the wrong conclusions.
It shows no budget, no cost per result and no volume of enquiries. Detailed spend data only ever applied to ads about social issues, elections or politics, and Meta ended that category of advertising in the European Union in 2025 in response to incoming European regulation.
It also says nothing about whether an advertiser is profitable. A business can run a losing campaign for months simply because it does not track its own numbers. The library shows what is being served, never what it returns.
The method, in four steps
- List ten to fifteen real competitors in your service area, not the national leaders whose economics have nothing to do with yours.
- For each one, record the number of active ads and the start date of the oldest.
- Sort the messages by promise, not by visual: price, turnaround, guarantee, proof, the fear being addressed.
- Find the promise nobody is making, then check it is one you can actually keep before you turn it into an ad.
The exercise takes about an hour and it shapes everything downstream: your angles, your campaign structure, and the budget you are willing to commit. Our guide to setting a Meta Ads budget covers how to turn this analysis into a test amount, and generating qualified enquiries for a local service covers what to do with it next.
The practical takeaway
The Ad Library will never hand you a competitor's campaign. It gives you something better: a map of everything already being said in your market, and therefore a list of what is left to say.
Start there. It is the only campaign preparation step that is free, verifiable, and impossible to outsource to a tool.