Spy on competitors · Facebook Ads Spy

Facebook ads spy tools: what media buyers use for live FB and Instagram ads

Spying on Facebook ads usually means manually paging through the ad library, with no way to tell which of a brand's twenty creatives is actually carrying their budget.

AdEye does not read Meta's library, so for Facebook creative that sorting is still manual. AdEye turns Google's public ad data into a sortable feed instead, tags each ad by hook and angle, and ranks by run length so the winners are obvious. It is all public ad-library data, made instantly useful.

The reason media buyers reach for a Facebook ad spy tool rather than the ad library itself is ranking. Meta shows you every ad a page is running, in no useful order, with no indication of which one has been live for three months and which launched yesterday and dies tomorrow. Run length is the signal that survives that, because an advertiser who keeps paying to run a creative is telling you it works. AdEye reads both off the public record and sorts by them, which turns a wall of thumbnails into a ranked list of what is actually carrying spend.

Ad Intelligence Feed

Live Google data

Enter a brand or a domain

Searching the Google Ads Transparency Center...

Try:

Public Google Ads Transparency data. Nothing behind a login.

Open your swipe file

Google Ads Transparency has no ads on record for that search. Google indexes ads by advertiser, so the brand's exact domain works best, for example nike.com.

Google Ads Transparency has no ads on record for . That is an answer about the brand, not a problem with the search: they are not running Google ads that Google publishes, or they advertise under a different registered name.

We could not reach Google Ads Transparency just now, so this is not a result about that brand, we simply could not look. Please try again in a moment. This search has not been counted against your allowance.

Open your swipe file

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See it run

Live Google Ads Transparency data · Run length · Public data only

GOOGLE ADS TRANSPARENCY

Run length on every ad

AI-tagged hooks & angles

Why it works

What a Facebook ads spy tool should do

Instant brand lookup

Type a brand name or domain and see the live public Google ads that advertiser is running, across Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube.

Spot the winners

Run lengths surface the ads a brand is putting real money behind.

Hook and angle tags

AI tags let you filter to the exact messaging patterns you want to study or model.

What it surfaces

Every ad card carries the hook, angle and a working signal

You type a brand or a domain. AdEye pulls that advertiser's live public Google ads into one feed and AI-tags each creative on the paid plans, so you read the strategy and spot the long-running winners before you save a single one.

Look up any brand's live Google ads
Surface their scaling creatives
Filter by hook and angle
Save winners to a swipe file
See run length
See Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube in one feed
See when each ad first appeared in Google's archive
Export a board to CSV for a client or team (paid plans)
Public ad-library data only

GOOGLE Top performer

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PATAGONIA, INC. · RUNNING 1,789D

Why AdEye

One feed, the AI read, the working signal in view

Not a stale doc full of screenshots. One query for a brand, the run length on every creative, and a swipe file worth reopening. Public ad-library data only.

Every Google ad at once

The Google Ads Transparency Center searched by brand or domain, so competitor ad research is one query instead of clicking through Google's own viewer.

The AI reads the why

Creatives are tagged with their hook, angle and format on the paid plans, a few per search and kept once read, and a working signal flags the long-runners, so you see why an ad works, not just what it ran.

A swipe file that stays current

Save winners to boards, each keeping its run length and a link back to the original creative on Google, so the file is still useful months later.

Good questions

Questions about facebook ads spy

AdEye ranks a brand's public ads by how long they have been live. Ads that keep running for weeks are almost always the ones a brand is scaling, so they rise to the top.

No. AdEye only reads the public Google Ads Transparency Center that anyone can view, and the same is true of the free Meta and TikTok libraries. There is no interaction with the advertiser, so your research is invisible to them.

An ad spy tool collects the ads brands are currently running from public ad libraries and makes them searchable, filterable and saveable. Different tools read different libraries; AdEye reads Google's. Good ad spy tools add creative tagging and signals for which ads are running longest.

Go to facebook.com/ads/library, set the country to United States, choose "All ads" and search the brand's Page name. Meta publishes every live Facebook and Instagram ad there for free, with no account needed. The free library works fine for one lookup; it becomes painful when you are tracking a dozen brands weekly and need to sort, tag and save what you find.

Not honestly. Meta publishes spend ranges only for political, election and social-issue ads, and Google and TikTok publish none for commercial ads. Any tool showing a precise competitor budget for a normal ecommerce or SaaS ad is modeling an estimate. The reliable public signals are how long each ad has run.

It depends on how wide your research goes. Meta-only tools are cheaper and go deep on Facebook and Instagram. If your competitors also buy Google Search, Shopping, Display or YouTube, a Meta-only tool leaves that part invisible. AdEye covers the Google side, so one brand search returns their whole live Google footprint. It does not cover Meta or TikTok.

Viewing the Meta Ad Library is not against any rule. Meta built it for advertising transparency and intends it to be public. Studying rivals' live ads for research is standard competitive practice; republishing their creative as your own is what crosses the line, both with Meta and with copyright law.

Open the advertiser in the Meta Ad Library, or search their brand or domain in a tool that reads it for you. The library is public and needs no login, so anyone can see every active Facebook and Instagram ad a page runs. The part it will not do is tell you which of those ads matters, which is why most people sort by run length instead of scrolling.

The Meta Ad Library itself is free and is the underlying source every paid tool reads. It works well for checking one brand once. Free tools stop being enough when you need run length on every creative, a searchable swipe file you can export on the paid plans, or hook and angle tags. AdEye adds those for a brand's Google advertising; it does not cover Facebook or TikTok.

The category runs from roughly $30 a month at the low end to $250 or more for the established players, with most landing between $50 and $150. What separates them is usually coverage and data freshness rather than features. Our own tiers are on the pricing page, and we break the market down in how much ad spy tools cost.

Every ad in the Meta Ad Library carries a start date, so the run length is public. AdEye reads that date on every creative and sorts by it, which is the single most useful filter in competitor research. An ad still live after 60 to 90 days is almost certainly profitable, because no advertiser funds a losing creative for a quarter.

The Meta Ad Library shows a total count per advertiser, but the raw number is misleading because one creative split across placements and audiences can appear many times. What matters is how many distinct creative concepts they run. We cover how to read that count properly in this guide.

No. The Meta Ad Library is a public transparency record and loads without a login, and AdEye reads that same public record independently of any account of yours. Nothing you look at is tied to your personal Facebook profile, and the advertiser gets no signal that you viewed their ads.

The Ad Library is Meta's raw transparency archive: complete for Facebook and Instagram, free, and deliberately unsorted. An ad spy tool reads that archive and adds the layer Meta left out, which is search across advertisers, ranking by run length, tagging by hook and angle, and saved swipe files that keep a creative after the ad stops in the same feed.

It depends on what you buy. AdSpy holds the largest independent Facebook and Instagram index and is the reference for affiliate research. Foreplay is the strongest pure swipe-file workflow for creative teams. BigSpy is the cheapest broad option. Minea and Dropispy are built around dropshipping and Shopify product research. AdEye is aimed at people researching the Google side, YouTube included; it is not a Facebook tool and a Facebook-only database will beat it there. We compare pricing and coverage across all of them in the ad spy tools buyer's guide.

Four things, in this order. Whether it sorts by run length, because that is the only reliable public signal of what is working. Whether it collapses duplicate ad IDs, since Meta lists the same creative many times and a raw ad count is close to meaningless. Whether saved ads stay searchable months later. And whether it covers the other platforms your competitors buy, because a Facebook-only view misses where a lot of budget now goes.

For one lookup, no. The free Meta Ad Library answers "is this brand advertising and what does the creative look like" completely, and it costs nothing. Paid tools earn their keep at volume: checking a dozen brands weekly, wanting the ads tagged so you can filter a category by angle, or keeping everything in one searchable swipe file. If you check competitors twice a year, stay free.

The deciding factor is usually client reporting rather than database size. An agency needs shared boards, per-client separation, and exports that go into a deck. Raw index depth matters less than most vendor comparisons suggest, because agencies research a known list of brands rather than trawling for unknown winners. Our agency setup covers how that workflow runs.

Mostly not, and this is the single biggest limitation people discover late. Meta lists ordinary commercial ads only while they are actively delivering, so the day an advertiser pauses a campaign the creative leaves the public record. Tools that show older ads built their own historical index by crawling continuously. Anything reading the live Ad Library, including AdEye, shows you what is running now, which is why saving the good ones when you see them matters.

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