How To Use the Meta Ad Library in 2026: 9 Ways

Advertising on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram offers huge potential to reach customers because each platform has about three billion monthly users, according to Statista. 

But competition for user attention is fierce, with 70% of companies overall and 77% to 78% of small to medium-sized businesses using Facebook and Instagram for marketing, according to Hubspot’s 2026 State of Marketing report. 

Meta Ad Library is a free research tool that lets you search all the active ads running across Meta technologies. Read on for nine different ways to use the Meta Ad Library to develop your paid advertising strategy.

What is the Meta Ad Library?

The Meta Ad Library is a digital database containing information about ads currently running across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, Messenger, and websites partnering with Meta via its Audience Network. All currently active ads are searchable there. 

Businesses can also use the Meta Ad Library to research other company’s ads and apply learnings to their own advertising strategies.

Meta launched what was then known as the Facebook Ad Library in 2018 as the company faced criticism over transparency about political advertising on its platform. While the Meta Ad Library only displays non-political ads that are currently active, it stores details on ads about social issues, elections, and politics for seven years. Those details include information on spend, reach, and funders. 

Another tool, the Meta Ad Library Report, shows spending breakdowns for political ads over the past seven years.

If ads target users in the European Union (EU) or its associated territories, Meta displays additional information on who paid for the ad, which could be different from the advertiser. These ads stay in the Meta Ad Library for one year after their last impression (US-targeted ads disappear as soon as they stop running). 

Meta also has an Ad Library API available for users with programming knowledge who want to go deeper on political ads or ads delivered in the EU or United Kingdom (UK).

How to access the Meta Ad Library

Head to facebook.com/ads/library or search Meta Ad Library in your browser. You don’t need to be logged into a Facebook account to use the basic search functions, and the Meta Ad Library is free.

Here’s how to start searching for an ad:

1. Pick a country from the dropdown.

2. Choose an Ad category. To search for ads for most consumer goods, select All ads.

3. Enter a keyword or advertiser name in the search bar.

4. Refine your search by filtering for language, advertiser, platform, media type, active status, and impressions by date.

After you find an ad to analyze, select See Ad Details to learn more. Here, you can read the full ad copy, watch the video creative, and click through to the ad’s landing pages. You can also use the Meta Ad Library’s Branded Content search page to see sponsored content from creators.

When to use the Meta Ad Library for ad research

The Meta Ad Library helps marketers analyze advertising trends and competitor ads on Meta platforms. Use the Meta Ad Library to:

• Find real-world inspiration for your own Instagram ad and Facebook ad strategies
• Analyze competitors’ Meta ad campaigns
• Validate new ideas by checking if similar ads exist, then plan how to improve them
• Discover popular messaging on different social platforms
• Conduct an ad search for keywords and keyword phrases relevant to your brand
• Search for branded content to understand how brands leverage paid partnerships

If you sell on Facebook or Instagram, reviewing other brands’ ads can reveal the tactics those companies use to drive brand awareness and website traffic. Then, replicate those strategies in your own Meta ads. 

If you’re on Shopify, you can quickly start creating your own ads on Meta by installing the Facebook & Instagram app to your online store.

You’ll create your Meta ads through Meta Ads Manager, which you’ll automatically gain access to when you create a Facebook business page. 

One way to apply what you learn is to create retargeting ads, which you can make by adding the Meta pixel to your Shopify site. This line of code lets you show individual customers the products they browsed but didn’t buy.

9 ways to use the Meta Ad Library

1. View more ads from the same advertiser
2. Search keywords related to your business
3. Check out your competitors
4. Filter ads by country
5. See how long ads have run
6. See where ads appear
7. View ads by media type
8. Analyze brand partnerships
9. Find creative inspiration

Here are nine ways your business can use the Ad Library to gain strategic insights and find creative inspiration.

1. View more ads from the same advertiser

If you’re scrolling through Facebook or Instagram and see an ad that catches your eye, use the Meta Ad Library to see other ads run by the same advertiser. This helps you find inspiration from brands with strong creative assets.

To view multiple ads by the same brand, navigate to the Meta Ad Library, select your country (or select All to see global ads from the brand), then select “All ads.” Next, enter the brand’s name in the search bar. A dropdown will appear with profiles containing that name. Select the one you’re looking for to see their ads. 

Here’s the Meta Ad Library page for cosmetics brand Rare Beauty:

2. Search keywords related to your business

If you want to see Meta ads relevant to your business, search keywords related to your industry or products in the Meta Ad Library. This will give you an idea of current creative and messaging, so that you can spot trends.

For example, a vegan food brand might search “vegan condiments” and other keywords related to specific products it sells, such as “vegan tzatziki” or “vegan mozzarella.”

Keyword research, which is a part of search engine optimization (SEO), can help you find the most relevant phrases to search in the Meta Ad Library.

3. Check out your competitors

Use the Meta Ad Library to run a competitive analysis on rival brands’ advertising strategies. 

When you research another company’s ads, look for patterns and infer what’s performing well. If a company uses similar imagery and copy across its ads, it could indicate these creative assets perform well. 

You might also look for patterns in the types of ads (e.g., video, infographic) and try a similar mix for your own business. For example, Chamberlain Coffee primarily uses shoppable ads in a video format, although it also runs a handful of single image (as opposed to carousel) ads.

To see a competitor’s Meta ads, type their name in the Meta Ad Library search bar, then select their profile from the dropdown. You’ll then see all the brand’s current Meta ads.

You can also access a brand’s Meta Ad Library page through Facebook by looking at Page Transparency, which includes historical information about the page. This includes information such as when it was created and any history of name changes. 

Meta added the Page Transparency feature in an effort to increase the accountability for page owners and visibility into the history of pages on its platform. 

To see it on Facebook, navigate to the brand’s profile, then select the page name. Choose Transparency and Privacy Policy from the pop-up.

4. Filter ads by country

If you sell internationally, you might run different ad campaigns for customers in different locations. Seeing the ads running in those locations can give you an idea of what competitors are doing to target specific countries.

To see ads in a certain country, go to the dropdown menu to pull up a list of countries. You can either scroll to find the country of your choice or start typing its name in the search box.

If you’re looking up a specific competitor, you can search for the company, then filter the results by country.

5. See how long ads have run

Examining ads’ runtime can help you estimate the success of different ads. For example, if a brand has run a particular ad for a long time, it may indicate this ad has proven particularly effective.

To filter by date, conduct a search for a brand’s name in the Meta Ad Library, select Filters, scroll to the bottom of the pop-up window. Under “Impressions by Date,” fill in the single day or date range you want to see ads from. You can go back seven years.

6. See where ads appear

You can filter searches by platform to see where ads appear (on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, Threads, or Audience Network). If you conduct a general search, you can see where ads are being run by looking at the icons next to Platforms, in the ad details section of each search result.

Use this information to plan where you should place your ads. 

For example, maybe you notice that a rival brand has ads on WhatsApp and decide to use this platform to remain competitive. Or maybe you notice that none of your competitors are running Messenger ads, so you try experimenting with that ad placement to reach a new potential audience.

Here you can see that bag brand Baboon to the Moon is running ads on Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger. 

7. View ads by media type

You can publish a number of different types of ads to Facebook and Instagram, like video ads, carousels, and static images. If you want to see how a particular brand uses a certain type of ad—or how brands use different media types for specific keywords—you can filter by media type.

Enter your search term, click the Filters button, then select your desired ad type from the Media Type dropdown menu.

Use this feature to find inspiration on how to present products in different formats. For example, you might look at image ads to see how other brands showcase single products or series of products. 

8. Analyze brand partnerships

You can use the Meta Ad Library to search for sponsored content from social media content creators. This can give you an idea of competitors’ influencer marketing strategies and help identify the types of creators you might want to work with.

From the Meta Ad Library homepage, select Branded Content, which is in the upper right corner. Search by company or creator and choose between branded Facebook posts or branded Instagram posts. 

The results you’ll see have Meta’s paid partnership tag. Meta requires influencers and affiliates to add this label to their sponsored posts.

9. Find creative inspiration

You can search competitor brands to see the imagery and copywriting other industry players are using, or look to brands with advertising and branding strategies you admire, even if they’re outside of your industry. 

Here’s an example of an ad from olive oil brand Graza. The company uses a straightforward tagline, “Mayo made with only the good stuff,” and a simple product photo of three squeeze bottles to showcase its line of olive oil mayonnaise. Bright yellow and green make the ad visually pop. 

The ad’s caption uses colloquial speech (“Mayo’s about 65% oil, which is why you gotta use the good stuff!”) to convey Graza’s approachable brand personality.