When you study competitor ads, your eye goes to the creative first: the image, the video, the headline. But the ad's job does not end at the click. The sale happens on the page that opens after it. Knowing which product page a competitor sends traffic to, which collection it pushes, or whether it sends its ads to the home page or to a dedicated page is as valuable as knowing the creative.
The Meta Ad Library keeps the link of every ad, but it does not give them to you as a list. To see the addresses, you have to open the ads one by one. This article shows how to collect those addresses in one list and how to read that list.
1. The domain and landing address on the card
AdVantage Scope writes the domain an ad links to at the bottom of every ad card. Click the domain and the ad's landing address opens in a new tab; you do not have to open the ad in the library and look for the link.
If the address points to a Shopify store, the card shows a Shopify badge. The badge comes from the address itself:
- If the address contains a
/products/path, the ad goes to a product page. - If the address contains a
/collections/path, the ad goes to a collection page. - If the address is on a Shopify domain but contains neither path, it is a general Shopify page.
This distinction matters. An ad that goes to a single product page sells a specific product; an ad that goes to a collection pushes a category, and an ad that goes to the home page pushes the brand itself.
2. Load the list
Type the competitor's brand name, or the product term you are researching, into the Search Term box. If you care about the pages the competitor uses right now, set Status to Active; if you want to see older pages too, leave it on All.
Then run Auto Scan with Start scan in the bottom bar. The list loads page by page; every ad becomes a card with its domain, button, days running and stage. How to tell whether you really reached the end of the list is covered in how to see all of a competitor's ads.
3. Separate the addresses
Card filters work only on the cards on screen and send no new request to Meta. You can filter the same list from different angles as often as you like.
Separate product and collection pages. In the Shopify Type filter, pick Product or Collection. If the scan has cards going to that type, their number is written next to the option. If many ads in a search go to product pages, competitors are pushing individual products; if many go to collections, they are selling categories.
Look at a single domain. The Search card text box searches the domain as well as the card's text. Type the competitor's domain; only the ads that go to that address stay on screen. If the same brand uses more than one domain, this is how you see it.
Bring advertisers together. With Group Same Advertisers on, an advertiser's ads are gathered on one card, with the number of ads written on top. You see at a glance how many ads each advertiser shows in this search. If you set Sort to Brand A→Z, the same brand's cards sit next to each other even without grouping.
Separate the ones that go to a sale. Cards also show the ad's button. If you only want to see ads with a sales button such as Shop Now, use the Button Filter; this filter is in the Starter plan.
4. Collect the addresses in one list
Browsing cards is enough for discovery, but if you want a list, you need to write the addresses into a spreadsheet. The extension's Google Sheets Integration is in the Starter plan.
First, use Create a new spreadsheet so that the extension creates a spreadsheet in your Google account. Then set your filters and press Send All Ads on Screen to Sheets. Only the cards that pass your filters are sent; every ad is added to the end of the spreadsheet as one row. The columns are:
- Brand
- Domain
- CTA
- Days running
- URL: the ad's landing address
- Shopify type: whether the address is a product, collection or general Shopify page (empty if it is not Shopify)
- Saved on: the day you sent the row
If you want to collect only the ads you pick rather than the whole list, save an ad by double-clicking its creative and turn on Auto-send when an ad is saved; every ad you save is added to the spreadsheet on its own.
To share the spreadsheet with someone else, use Google's own share button. Setting up a spreadsheet layout for ad research is covered in detail in our Google Sheets article.
5. Read the list
Once the addresses sit in one list, patterns you cannot see on the cards come out. Sort the spreadsheet by Domain and look at these questions:
- Which address gets the most ads? The number of ads going to the same URL is a sign of how much the competitor invests in that page.
- Which pages do the long-running ads go to? Look at the addresses in the rows with a high Days running value. The page behind the ads a competitor keeps live for a long time is most likely a page that works for it.
- Product page, collection or home page? The Shopify type column shows whether competitors sell single products or categories.
- Is the same product on different addresses? A competitor that sells the same product from different pages is most likely testing those pages.
Then open the most important few addresses yourself. The library does not tell you how many sales a page brings in; looking at the page's price, offer, reviews and first screen is your job. We collected the page details to check for product research in our dropshipping product research checklist.
What do you do with this list?
- Compare your own landing page. Seeing whether competitors send traffic to a product page or a collection helps you decide where to link your own ad.
- Collect the offers. Prices, bundles and guarantees on landing pages are not always written in the ads.
- Watch the change. When you send the same search again a few weeks later, the new rows are separated by Saved on. This is how you see whether a competitor has moved its traffic to a new page.
Cost
The Ad Library is free. On the extension's free plan you can scan 2,000 ads a day, the limit resets in 6-hour windows and no credit card is needed. The domain and Shopify badge on the cards and Search card text also work on the free plan. You can see which plan sending to a spreadsheet and the Button Filter are in on the pricing page.
To do this with the extension: Export to Google Sheets