Competitor ad tracking: how to turn rivals’ ads into your next ad ideas

Three ways to do it

You can do all of this by hand for free, pay for a tool that keeps the ads for you, or use a tool that also turns them into ideas. The right one depends on how many competitors you watch and how much of the thinking you want to keep.

If you watch three to five competitors on Meta, start by hand.

Where to see your competitors’ ads for free

Every big ad platform now publishes a public library of ads. Transparency rules shaped most of them: the EU’s Digital Services Act requires the largest platforms to keep every ad shown in the EU searchable for a year. That’s why the European data is so much richer than anything you’ll see for the US. For a DTC brand, start with Meta’s library: it shows every ad currently running on Meta’s apps, in any country, and you don’t need an account to search it.

An ordinary ad that ran only in the US drops out of Meta’s library once it stops running, so if you didn’t save it, it’s gone.

Searching the Meta Ad Library, step by step

1. Open the Meta Ad Library and pick a country. “All” works for most brands; choose one country if you want to see a competitor’s ads for a specific market.
2. Set the ad category to “All ads”. The search box stays grayed out until you pick one.
3. Type the competitor’s name into “Search by keyword or advertiser” and choose their Page from the Advertisers list. “Search this exact phrase” instead returns every ad that mentions the name, including partnership ads run with creators.
4. Open Filters and set Active status to “Active ads”. Media type (videos, images) and Platform (Instagram only, say) narrow it further.
5. Read each card: the “Started running on” date, the Library ID (your permanent link to that ad), and “This ad has multiple versions”, which means they’re running variations of it. “See ad details” shows the versions.
6. Bookmark the results page. The URL keeps the country, status and Page, so next week the same view is one click away.

TikTok

TikTok’s Commercial Content Library is the real record, but it only covers ads shown in Europe (the EEA, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK). If a competitor only advertises in the US, it shows you nothing. The Creative Center’s Top Ads is a showcase of high-performing ads that advertisers agreed to share, sortable by click-through and view rates. It’s good for spotting formats that work on TikTok in your category, and no use for seeing everything one competitor runs.

Google and LinkedIn

The Google Ads Transparency Center is worth a monthly look if competitors run search or YouTube ads, and the LinkedIn Ad Library if you sell to businesses. One more manual trick: visit a competitor’s product page, accept their cookies, add something to your cart and leave. If they run retargeting and you fall inside their audience rules, some of their follow-up ads may start appearing in your feeds. Treat it as a bonus sighting, not a method you can rely on.

What to record for each ad

Log every ad in a spreadsheet, with the same columns, every week. This lets you spot multiple competitors moving to the same hook in the same month, which would not be possible by just keeping a folder of screenshots.

Here’s the same ad on two review days:

• Week 1: live, started August 14, two versions. Logged.
• Week 2: still live, now four versions, same hook, new offer line. Last seen moves to week 2; days running: 52. That’s a brand putting more effort behind something, which is worth a dated note.

If an ad is gone the next week, leave “last seen” alone and add “not found” with the date, rather than “stopped”. It may have been paused, switched to another country, or simply dropped from the library view. One missing week may be a glitch; an ad that never comes back after a sale ends means more.

How to read the signals

Nothing in an ad library tells you an ad worked. Every signal is a guess about two things you can’t see: budget and patience. You’ll often read that an ad running 30 days or more is a “winner”. It’s a reasonable hunch, but plenty of long-running ads are just cheap ones nobody switched off.

Our rule of thumb: give the most weight to convergence. One long-running ad could be a forgotten $10 a day. Three competitors landing on the same hook and keeping it for weeks tells you that the hook is a winner. Whether that hook sells for you is what your test is for.

Turning what you see into ad ideas

A tracked ad is only useful once it changes what you test next. Here’s a four-step way to get from a sheet of competitor ads to a brief you can make this week.

1. Find the pattern. Look for the same hook, angle, offer or format at two brands, ideally three.
2. Find the gap. Ask what nobody in the sheet is saying. If every competitor sells on price, a quality or ritual angle is open. If everyone runs polished studio video, plain phone-shot footage may stand out.
3. Pick your angle. Keep the pattern’s structure and pair it with something only your brand can truthfully say: a product detail, a founder story, a review you actually have.
4. Write the test brief. One concept per brief: hook, angle, format, proof, offer, and the one number that decides it.

What to borrow and what to drop

Copying an ad wholesale is a bad idea for three reasons: it can infringe their copyright or trademarks, it borrows claims you can’t back up, and it makes you the second brand in the feed saying the same thing.

Testing the idea

Treat each idea as a question your own ad account answers, and write the question down before you spend anything.

• Change one thing: test the hook only. Both versions share the same body, offer, landing page, audience and budget; only the first three seconds differ.
• Hypothesis: “Opening on the café queue gets cheaper add-to-carts than opening on the receipt.”
• One metric: the one closest to a sale that gets enough events to compare, such as cost per add to cart.
• Decision rule, written before launch: how long it runs, the minimum number of add-to-carts each version needs, and how much cheaper the winner has to be. If either version falls short of the minimum, call the result inconclusive rather than a win for whichever looks cheaper.

Meta’s A/B testing tool splits the audience so the versions don’t compete with each other. When a concept wins, add it to your sheet with its result, so next month’s patterns are read against something you’ve measured.

The limitations of free libraries

The free libraries are enough for a handful of competitors on Meta. Paid tools earn their price when you watch many brands, need history the libraries delete, or work across several platforms. They fall into five rough groups:

• Swipe files and creative libraries save ads for good and let you tag them: Foreplay, Atria, and MagicBrief.
• Multi-network ad databases search many platforms at once: AdSpyder and BigSpy.
• Search ad intelligence shows which keywords competitors bid on: SpyFu and Semrush.
• Spend estimates model what bigger advertisers spend: Sensor Tower (which owns Pathmatics).
• Page monitors alert you when a competitor’s library page changes: Visualping.

None of them can see a competitor’s results either; what you’re paying for is time and history. Before you buy, check which platforms a tool covers and how far back its history goes, because both vary a lot.

How Madverts is different

Madverts runs the whole loop above for you, from tracking your competitors’ ads to making the finished video ad.

• When you sign up it suggests competitors for your brand. Approve them or add your own.
• It checks each competitor’s Meta Ad Library page on a schedule (weekly on Starter, daily on Growth, every two hours on Pro), tracks and analyzes their organic Instagram posts, and keeps a record of every ad it has seen, even after Meta stops showing it.
• Each ad is analyzed for hook, angle, format, offer and funnel stage, so the patterns are already laid out in its market intelligence view.
• As evidence builds up across your competitors, it turns the patterns into ad ideas for your brand, with the reasoning attached. Pick one and Madverts makes the finished video ad.
• “Copy this ad” takes a competitor ad’s structure (hook, script shape, pacing) and rebuilds it for your brand, in your own words.

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