How to use Meta Ad Library

What the Meta Ad Library is

The Meta Ad Library is a public, searchable archive of ads running across Meta's apps. Meta built it for transparency, which means anyone can see what any business is advertising today, without logging in to an ad account and without the advertiser knowing you looked.

For a D2C brand this is the closest thing to a window into a competitor's marketing. You can see the exact images and videos they are paying to show, the words they use, the offers they lead with and how many versions they are testing at once.

How to search it, step by step

The interface changes from time to time, but the flow has stayed the same for years:

1. Open facebook.com/ads/library in a browser. You do not need to be logged in.
2. Set the country to India. Ads are shown by the country they are delivered in, so the wrong country hides most Indian D2C ads.
3. Set the ad category to 'All ads'. The other category covers political and social-issue ads, which work differently.
4. Type the brand name and pick the advertiser from the drop-down (the Page with its logo), rather than pressing Enter for a keyword search. This shows only that Page's ads.
5. Use the filters for active status, platform and date to narrow the list, and open 'See ad details' on any ad to see its versions.

What you can and cannot see

For each ad you can see the creative, the primary text and headline, the call-to-action button, the platforms it runs on, whether it is active and the date it started running. When an advertiser runs several versions of the same ad, the library groups them, which tells you they are testing variations.

What you cannot see for normal commercial ads in India is just as important: spend, impressions, reach, clicks, sales and targeting are not published. Spend and reach ranges are only shown for political and social-issue ads. Any tool that claims to show a D2C competitor's exact spend in India is estimating, not reading data.

The three signals worth reading

Because spend is hidden, experienced marketers read the library through a few proxies:

• Longevity: an ad that has been running for 60 or 90 days is almost certainly working, because brands switch off losing ads within days.
• Volume: the number of active ads shows how hard a brand is pushing right now. A sudden jump usually means a launch or a sale.
• Repetition: when the same hook, offer or format appears across many new ads, the brand has found something it believes in.

Where the Ad Library falls short

The library is built for looking up one advertiser at a time. It keeps no history once ads stop (for commercial ads in India), has no labels for hooks or offers, does not compare brands side by side and does not tell you what changed since you last looked. Teams end up with folders of screenshots and no memory of what a rival was running last month.

That gap is what tools like Zooptrack fill: the same public data, collected every day for every rival, kept after ads stop, labelled by hook, offer, format and language, and summarised as 'what changed'. You can see the result for real brands on our free brand pages.