The free method, step by step
- 01Open the Meta Ad Library, set the country, and search the creator by their page name rather than their personal name · most run ads from a brand page.
- 02Filter to active ads only. An inactive ad tells you what they stopped doing, which is useful later but noise at this stage.
- 03Read the start date on each ad. The ones running longest are the winners · they would have been switched off otherwise.
- 04Look for the same hook appearing across several creatives. A repeated angle in different formats means it survived their testing.
- 05Open the ad detail to see which platforms it runs on. A creative built for Reels and a creative built for the feed are different strategies.
- 06For ads served in the EU, the library also shows reach. It is the only real audience-size number Meta publishes, and paid tools resell it as a premium feature.
- 07Follow the link to see the offer, then repeat for the next creator.
Search by page name, not by person. « Academy », « Coaching » and « Method » in the page name will find more infopreneurs than a personal name will.
Where this stops working
- You have to know who to search. The archive has no « show me every coaching advertiser in Germany » button · that is the query you actually want.
- No history. You see the ads running today, not that they went from 4 ads to 40 last month, which is the signal that matters.
- Media expires. Old creatives stop loading, so the ads that built the business become impossible to study.
- No niche view. You cannot see what is typical, so you cannot tell whether 12 active ads is a lot or nothing.
- No export, no saving, no comparison. Everything you find lives in a spreadsheet you maintain by hand.
How LaunchSpy does the same thing
- Search creators by niche, country, platform and current activity, instead of guessing page names
- Every ad kept with its media, including the ones Meta no longer serves
- Ad history per creator, so a change in cadence is visible rather than guessed
- EU reach plus the age and gender the ad targets, on every ad that has it
- Compare up to five creators side by side, and save what matters to a board
Questions people ask
Can a creator hide their ads from the library?
No. Publishing them is a legal obligation for Meta, not a setting the advertiser controls. What they can do is run from a page name you would not think to search.
How do I know an ad is actually working?
Duration is the strongest free signal. An ad live for over a month is almost certainly profitable. Repetition of the same angle across creatives is the second signal.
Does the Ad Library show how much they spend?
Only for political and issue ads. For commercial ads, spend is not published · anyone showing you an exact spend figure for a commercial advertiser is estimating it.
Do this for a whole niche, not one page at a time
110,000+ creators · 15.2M+ ads · 260,000+ funnels · 51 platforms · 10 markets
Start free