Reading a competitor page

Ads, and what the numbers are

You land on Ads: the whole grid, anything new to you first, then longest-running. Each card says how many days that ad has been live and how many versions of it Meta groups together.

There is no spend, no click-through and no conversion figure here, because Meta publishes none. Survival is the scoreboard, and every ranking on this page rests on it.

The bar on top holds a search, a count of what arrived since you last looked, and Filters, which also sets the column count.

Patterns

The second tab opens with the strongest thing that is true about this brand, badged Proven, New or Gap, with a figure beside it and the rest a chevron away. Nothing is written unless the numbers carry it, so a thin or young library says less.

Under it are strips of the actual creatives, never a table:

• What has lasted is their ten longest-running ads.
• What they tested hardest appears only when they run more than one version of something.
• Their widest audience appears only for ads Meta discloses a reach for.

A row of pills regroups the library one way at a time: opening line, angle, who it targets, emotion, framework, offer, desire, where it lands, format. Only the ones their ads carry are offered, and you get the six largest groups.

Every strip names its group, counts it, gives its oldest ad and carries up to two tags. A tag appears only where it marks the group out from what the brand does anyway, so no tags means it looks like the rest.

See all on a strip, and Show me on a finding, narrows the grid to those ads. A chip in the bar names the narrowing and clears it.

One ad up close

Pressing a card opens it beside the grid: days running, versions, EU reach, what the ad is made of, its body copy, its format and its platforms. Open in Ad Library goes to Meta's record of it.

Read the creative has a model look at the picture and add the two things only the picture answers: its visual hook and its production quality.

Turning a finding into a brief

The button on a finding, Make one like it or Draft the same page, opens a new session with the message already written in the composer, evidence included. You read it, change it and send it.