See which ads your competitors keep running — then make yours

What is the Meta Ad Library?

The Meta Ad Library is Meta's public, searchable database of ads. According to Meta's Transparency Center and Help Center (both checked 23 September 2026), people can search all ads currently active across Meta's products, at facebook.com/ads/library.

What it shows depends on the kind of ad:

• Ordinary commercial ads — the kind your competitors run — appear while they are active.
• Ads about social issues, elections or politics stay searchable whether active or not, are kept for seven years, and carry extra details such as spend, reach and who paid for them.
• Ads delivered in the EU are shown while active and archived for one year after their last impression, per the Transparency Center.

So for a typical small-business competitor, the Ad Library tells you what they are running right now. It does not tell you how those ads perform.

What does VideoPronto do with a competitor's ads?

It does the reading for you. Searching the Ad Library by hand means scrolling a competitor's ads one at a time, watching each video and taking notes. VideoPronto takes the competitor's Facebook page URL — or links to specific ads you have seen — and:

1. Pulls their active ads from the Meta Ad Library, with each ad's video or image, copy, call to action, start date and the platforms it runs on.
2. Analyzes every ad on seven dimensions: the hook in the first seconds, the angle, the visual format, the copy framework, the call-to-action approach, the emotional trigger and the audience it signals.
3. Finds the patterns across all the ads — the hooks, offers and formats the competitor keeps renewing.
4. Hands you concepts written for your brand, not theirs. Each concept is one click from becoming a video, using your own Brand Kit, presenter and language.

You get concepts, not just a report. The point is to walk away with the next ad to make.

Why study the ads a competitor keeps renewing?

Because it shows where a competitor is putting real money, and searching it costs nothing. An advertiser who keeps paying to run the same hook for weeks, or rebuilds the same offer in several ads, is usually seeing something worth paying for. A competitor's one-off test that disappeared tells you much less.

Treat it as a signal, not proof. The Ad Library does not publish how many sales or leads an ad brought in, so a long-running ad might be profitable or might simply be forgotten. The patterns across several ads, and across several competitors, are more reliable than any single ad.

What should I do with what I find?

Borrow the pattern, never the ad. A competitor's winning hook structure — a confession, a price reveal, a "stop doing this" — is a format anyone can use. Their script, footage, music, brand name and customer testimonials are theirs, and copying them is both a legal risk and bad advertising: it makes your ad look like theirs.

A good workflow:

• Pick two or three competitors you actually lose customers to, not the biggest brand in your category.
• Run research on them together so the report can show which patterns they share.
• Make two or three concepts from the report, each with a different hook, and run them against each other. At about $3.30 a video, testing several hooks is cheap.
• Repeat every month or two — the ads a competitor keeps renewing change as the market does.

For a hands-on walkthrough of the Ad Library itself, including how to search it without any tool, see how to research competitor ads in the Facebook Ad Library. For the hook patterns that come up most, see video ad hooks.

How much does competitor research cost?

Research uses the same credits as videos, with no add-on fee and no subscription. A competitor scan usually uses 300 to 600 credits depending on how many ads are found. You are billed the actual usage, hard-capped at an amount shown before you start. Credits come in one-time packs of $20, $50, $500 or $1,000 and do not expire; see pricing.

Does it work for Spanish-language competitors?

Yes. The Ad Library lists active ads whatever their language, and VideoPronto analyzes Spanish ads the same way it analyzes English ones. That matters in markets like South Florida, where a competitor may run one set of ads in English and another in Spanish. The concepts you get back can be made in English or in Spanish by variety — Miami Cuban, Mexican, Colombian, Puerto Rican, Argentinian, Tejano or Spain — written in Spanish rather than translated. See Spanish video ads.

Where does research fit with the rest of VideoPronto?

Research answers "what should the ad be?" The rest of VideoPronto answers "make it." Paste your link to build the Brand Kit the concepts use, then render them as UGC ads, Real Voices, podcast clips or product showcases.