If you're spending money on Facebook ads without knowing what your competitors are running, you're guessing. Every ad a competitor runs that stays live for more than a few weeks is a data point: the creative works, the offer converts, and the audience responds. That information is available to you, and using it costs nothing.
Here's a complete breakdown of how to do competitor ad research on Facebook, starting with the free tool Meta provides and moving through more powerful options as your needs grow.
Why competitor ads are the most reliable research you can do
Most creative research wastes time on opinions. Focus groups, surveys, internal brainstorms, all of these tell you what people say they like. Competitor ads tell you what actually made people click, read, and buy, because advertisers who keep running the same ad are paying real money to keep it live. No one keeps a losing ad running.
A competitor who has been running the same video ad for 90 days has effectively run a very expensive A/B test for you. The hook works. The offer converts. The format resonates with the audience you're both trying to reach. That's intelligence you can build on directly.
The question is how to find those ads efficiently and extract the patterns from them. That's what the rest of this guide covers.
Start here: the Facebook Ads Library
Meta's Facebook Ads Library is a public database of every active ad on Facebook and Instagram. You can access it without an account. No login required.
To use it:
- Go to facebook.com/ads/library
- Select your country and set the ad category to "All ads"
- Search by page name (your competitor's brand) or by keyword (a product, hook, or phrase)
- Browse active ads, click through to see copy, creative, platforms, and when the ad started running
For any ad, you can see the creative (image or video), the body copy, which platforms it's running on, and the date it started. If an ad shows "Started running on [date]" from months ago, that's a signal: this ad is working.
You can also search by keyword to find ads mentioning a specific topic, product type, or pain point across all advertisers, not just ones you already know.
The Ads Library is genuinely useful and completely free. But it has real limitations that matter once you're doing this research regularly.
- No sorting by spend, duration, or engagement, so you can't quickly surface the strongest performers
- No bulk export, every ad has to be reviewed manually
- Pagination is slow and breaks frequently with large result sets
- No keyword trend data, so you can't see which angles are gaining traction over time
- Search results are limited and don't support advanced filtering by media type, audience, or placement
For occasional lookups on a single competitor, the Ads Library is fine. For systematic research across a niche, it becomes a bottleneck fast.
A faster way: Spreshapp Ad Spy
Spreshapp Ad Spy is a searchable database of Facebook and Instagram ads built on top of Meta's data but with the filtering and organization the native Ads Library doesn't provide.
You can filter by:
- Keyword or phrase in the ad copy
- Country the ad is targeting
- Media type: image, video, or carousel
- How long the ad has been running (a good proxy for performance)
- Niche or product category
When you find ads worth saving, you can organize them into folders for a specific project, client, or campaign. The detail view shows the full creative, copy, and available metadata in one place without having to navigate between individual ad pages.
The practical difference is speed. Researching a niche in the Ads Library might take an hour of manual scrolling. The same research in Ad Spy takes ten minutes because the filtering surfaces what you're looking for directly.
For developers and power users: the Ad Library API
If you're building internal tools, running automated workflows, or need to analyze ads at scale, Spreshapp's Ad Library API gives you programmatic access to the same ad data via a clean JSON API.
What you can do with it:
- Pull ads matching a keyword or brand name into your own database
- Track when competitors launch new creatives or kill old ones
- Feed ad data into your own dashboards or reporting tools
- Run bulk analysis across hundreds of ads without manual effort
- Integrate competitor ad intelligence into your existing research pipeline
The API returns structured data including creative URLs, copy, run dates, and available metadata fields. You authenticate with an API key and call standard REST endpoints. No scraping, no rate limit headaches with Meta's own API.
This is the right layer if you want competitor ad intelligence to feed into something rather than just browse it.
Go even further with the MCP integration
Spreshapp also exposes its ad data through an MCP server. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a standard that lets AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and other compatible clients call external data sources as tools during a conversation.
In practice: once you connect Spreshapp's MCP to your AI environment, you can ask things like "find all video ads from [brand] that started running in the last 30 days" and get structured results back without leaving your workflow. The AI handles the query, the MCP server fetches the data, and you get ad results directly in context.
This is useful for a few specific workflows:
- Brief generation: pull competitor ads and immediately ask the AI to identify the recurring angles, then draft a brief for your own campaign
- Trend monitoring: query a set of brands on a schedule and summarize what's changed since the last check
- Creative analysis: pass ad copy into the same context as your own drafts and ask for a comparison
The MCP layer collapses the gap between finding an ad and doing something with it. Instead of exporting data, switching tools, and reformatting, everything happens in one session.
Which option fits your situation
The Facebook Ads Library is the right starting point for anyone who hasn't done this research before. It's free, requires no account, and gives you a direct look at what any brand is running. Start there.
If you're doing this research more than once a week, or across more than a handful of brands, Ad Spy will save you significant time through better filtering and saved folders.
If you're building something with the data, the API is the clean path. And if you work primarily inside AI tools, the MCP integration removes the friction of moving data between systems.
The research itself is straightforward once you know where to look. The competitors doing the most testing have already done the hard work of figuring out what converts. All you have to do is pay attention.
