Meta makes the ads running on Facebook and Instagram public, so finding a competitor's ads is easy. Reading them well is the hard part: knowing which ads matter, what the brand is testing and what it has decided to keep.
This guide gives you a repeatable method. You will find every ad a brand runs, use run time and reach to separate winners from tests, break the winners down into format, hook and offer, and keep what you learn in a swipe file you can actually use.
Where to find a competitor's Meta ads
Meta's Ad Library
Meta's public ad library lets anyone search ads by advertiser name or keyword. You can filter by country, by whether the ad is active, by platform and by media type. Each ad shows when it started running and the platforms it appears on, and some ads note that they have several versions.
It works well for a quick look at one brand. It gets slow when you want to compare many brands, sort ads by performance signals or keep notes over weeks.
Reach data for ads shown in the EU
Under the European Union's Digital Services Act, Meta shows reach for ads delivered in the EU. That gives you something most ad libraries don't: an estimate of how many people actually saw an ad.
Keep the limits in mind. Reach covers EU delivery only, so a brand that sells mainly in the United States may show little or nothing.
And reach tells you about distribution, not sales. Still, when one ad has reached far more people than a brand's other ads, that brand is clearly putting budget behind it.
Step 1: find the brand and all of its pages
Start with the brand's website and its main Facebook page. Then check whether it advertises from other pages too. Larger brands often run ads from several pages, for different countries, product lines or sub-brands.
Also look for ads that creators or partners run for the brand. These partnership ads show the brand's products from someone else's account, and they are easy to miss if you only search the brand's name.
Step 2: sort by how long ads have run
Run time is your first filter. An ad that has been live for weeks has survived the brand's own reviews, and advertisers rarely keep funding ads that lose money. Ads launched in the last few days are mostly tests.
Two cautions. Retargeting ads aimed at past visitors can run for a long time on small budgets, so a long run doesn't always mean scale.
And a brand may relaunch a winning creative as a new ad, which resets its start date. That is why it helps to count duplicates: the same creative launched many times is a strong sign the brand is scaling it.
Step 3: read the formats
Note the format of every ad you keep: single image, video or carousel. Then look at the mix across the account.
A brand that runs mostly video has likely found that video works for its product. A sudden shift toward images can mean it is testing cheaper creative.
Go one level deeper on video. Is it polished studio footage, a creator talking to camera, or a simple product demo shot on a phone?
Is it vertical, made for Reels and Stories, or square for the feed? These choices tell you what the brand believes its customers respond to.
Step 4: break down hooks and offers
The hook is the first line of copy and the first seconds of a video. It decides whether anyone keeps watching. For each winning ad, write the hook down word for word and tag its type.
| Hook type | Illustrative example | When it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Problem | "Your running shoes are why your knees hurt." | Products that fix a clear pain |
| Result | "Same plants, twice the flowers, one change." | Visible before and after outcomes |
| Curiosity | "The kitchen tool chefs won't stop buying." | New or unusual products |
| Social proof | "Why 4,000 reviews say the same thing." | Brands with strong reviews |
| Offer | "Two for the price of one, this week only." | Promotions and seasonal peaks |
Then record the offer: a discount, free shipping, a bundle, a gift with purchase or a guarantee. Note where it appears: in the hook, in the body copy, in the headline under the creative or only on the landing page.
Before you match a competitor's discount, check that you can afford it. The break-even ROAS calculator shows how much a lower price raises the return on ad spend you need.
Step 5: weigh what you see with reach
Once you have a brand's long-running ads, use ad reach to rank them. The few ads with the highest reach usually carry the account, and those are the ones to study first.
Reach over time is even more useful. A sharp climb shows when the brand pushed budget behind an ad, often at a launch or a sale. A flat line on an old ad suggests it is still running but no longer scaled, perhaps because of ad fatigue.
Step 6: build a swipe file
A swipe file is a collection of ads you keep for ideas. Most swipe files fail because they become a pile of screenshots nobody opens. Three rules keep yours useful:
- Organize by angle, not by brand. Folders such as "problem hooks", "bundle offers" or "creator demos" are easier to use when you brief new creative.
- Write one line on why each ad is there. "Ran for over two months, several duplicates, hook names the pain in the first line."
- Prune it. Remove ads that stopped quickly after you saved them. They were tests, not winners.
Step 7: follow the brand over time
One audit is a snapshot. The real insight comes from watching a brand week after week: which new ads it launches, which ones it stops, which hooks it keeps rewriting and which landing pages it sends traffic to.
Set a short weekly review for your three to five closest competitors. Look for ads that are gaining ground, changes in headlines or offers, and new formats. When a competitor tests the same idea in five versions, it is telling you where it thinks the next winner is.
How to do this with SellWinners
SellWinners covers each step of this method in one place.
Find the brand and read its whole account
The Meta Ads Library lets you look a brand up by name or domain and returns its shop and its Facebook pages, with the main page marked. You can then list every ad of a page sorted by reach, date, days running or number of duplicates.
For each shop you also get the share of image and video in its ads and the landing pages its ads point to. Open any ad for its copy, headline, video transcript, hook, estimated spend, rank on the page and reach day by day.
Search across brands
In Ads in the app, the Meta tab of the Ads Library searches words in the copy, the brand or the landing page. A useful starting set of filters:
- Status set to active and Days running of at least 30.
- Format set to video if you want to study hooks.
- EU and UK ads only, if you sell in Europe, since Meta publishes reach for ads delivered in the EU.
- Sort by reach, by duplicates, or by rank gained to see ads climbing on their page.
A general search shows one ad per brand. Set Ads per brand to 0 to see every ad of each brand, or use the Brand filter to stay on one competitor. To find the brands themselves, search Advertisers in the app by brand, ad copy or website copy.
Keep your swipe file in Folders
Save ads to boards in Folders (Boards in the app) and group boards into folders by angle. Share a board or a single ad with a public link. Turn on Hide saved ads in a Meta search so you only see ads you haven't saved yet.
Follow brands with the Brand Tracker
Add a competitor to the Brand Tracker with its domain, then open its reports in Trackers in the app: top ads, ads gaining rank, creative tests grouped by launch day, format mix, audience, hooks, video scripts, headlines, ad texts and landing pages.
A daily record of each brand's ad texts and headlines starts the day you add it, so the evolution reports show what changed and when.
Across all the brands you track, you can see top ads and scaling ads together. If you work with an AI agent, the same reports are available over MCP, so your agent can give you a daily digest of what your competitors changed. See the pricing page for what each plan includes.
Key takeaways
- Find every page a brand advertises from, including partner and creator ads.
- Use run time, duplicates and EU reach together to separate winners from tests.
- Write down the format, hook and offer of each winning ad, word for word.
- Organize your swipe file by angle and note why each ad earned its place.
- Follow your closest competitors weekly: changes tell you more than a single snapshot.