The Meta Ad Library shows every ad currently running on Meta's apps, free and without logging in, so an agency can see a competitor's creatives, offers and how long each ad has been live; in India it does not show spend, reach or targeting except for political and social issue ads, so treat it as a map of what competitors say, not of what works for them.
Before a pitch, a launch or a creative refresh, the most useful half hour an agency can spend is looking at what everyone else in the client's category is already running. Meta publishes that, for free, in the Ad Library at facebook.com/ads/library. You don't need an ad account or even a login to search it.
How to search it
- Set the country to India. The library shows ads by where they are delivered, so a competitor running ads only in India won't appear under another country.
- Choose "All ads" as the category, unless you are researching political or social issue ads.
- Search by advertiser for a known competitor (pick their Page from the suggestions), or by keyword for a whole category: "2 BHK", "IELTS coaching", "hair transplant".
- Filter to active ads, and by platform or media type if you only care about Instagram Reels, say, or video.
What it shows, and what it doesn't
For each ad you see the creative, the copy, the Page that ran it, the platforms it appears on, and the date it started running. Where a competitor runs several versions of one ad, the library groups them, which shows you what they are testing.
For ordinary ads in India it does not show spend, impressions, reach, targeting or results. Those are published only for ads about politics, elections or social issues, which carry spend and reach ranges. So you can see what a competitor is saying, but not whether it's working.
The Ad Library tells you what competitors are saying. It never tells you whether it's working for them.
Four ways agencies use it
- Map the category's offers before writing a single ad. In real estate that's possession dates, payment plans and "no pre-EMI" offers; in coaching it's batch dates and results claims. The gap nobody is filling is often the angle worth testing.
- Look at how long ads have run. An ad live for three months is at least not losing so badly that someone stopped it. It's a clue, not proof: some advertisers simply forget to switch ads off.
- Check your own client. Search the client's Page to confirm what is actually running, and search the brand name as a keyword to catch Pages impersonating them, which is common for well-known brands and worth reporting.
- Prepare for a prospect call. Ten minutes on a prospect's current ads tells you what they sell, how often they refresh creative and which offers they lean on, before they've told you anything.
What not to do
- Don't copy a competitor's creative. Apart from the obvious problem, an ad built for their offer and their audience rarely works for yours.
- Don't read a long-running ad as a winning one. Without spend and results you're guessing.
- Don't judge your client's results against what competitors seem to be doing. The only fair comparison for a client's cost per lead is its own history; see there is no good cost per lead.