A new product or store idea rarely comes with a single niche; there are usually three or four candidates: pet products, home organisation, or fitness accessories? Look at each one separately in the Ad Library and all of them seem "crowded but promising". The problem is looking at each one with a different eye. If you study one niche for ten minutes and another for an hour, what you compare is not the niches but the effort you put in.
This article is about comparing niches with the same measure: scanning with the same settings, putting the same signals side by side in a single table, and what to watch for when you read the differences.
What the library tells you, and what it does not
The Meta Ad Library does not publish spend, impressions or sales for commercial ads. You cannot read the market size of a niche from the library. What you can read is how advertisers behave in that niche: how many of them advertise, how long their ads live, how often they launch new ads and which offers they use. Every comparison in this article rests on that behaviour.
1. Scan with the same settings
The first rule of comparison: run the search for every niche with the same settings.
- The same country. Compare niches in the market where you plan to sell. How the same niche changes from country to country is covered in our ads by country article.
- The same status. Pick the same Status for every niche. Active if you want to measure today's competition, All if you want to see the past too.
- The same search type. For each niche, pick terms of similar length and breadth and search with the same Search Type.
- The same sample size. Set the Limit in the Auto Scan section to the same number for every niche and leave Limit Mode on Total. Scanning few cards from one niche and many from another makes the numbers impossible to compare.
Then load the list for each niche with Start scan. When the scan ends, the Detailed Analytics, Top Advertisers and Market Signals sections of the panel show the summary of that niche.
These sections summarise every card in the scan; changing the card filters does not change them. So even if you filter the cards however you like while studying a niche, that niche's summary stays the same.
2. Build a single table
For each niche, write the rows below into a table. A sheet of paper, a notes file or a spreadsheet is enough; what matters is that every niche has the same rows.
From Detailed Analytics:
- Total, Active and Inactive: the scanned ads and how many of them are still live.
- The Video / Image ratio: which creative format dominates the niche.
- Top CTAs: which buttons the ads use most.
From Top Advertisers: the first five advertisers on the list and the number of ads for each.
From Market Signals:
- Ad age distribution: a chart of how many days the ads have been running.
- Average variation: how many ads a creative is used in, on average.
- Creative refresh: how many of the scanned ads started recently.
- Shopify rate: how much of the ads go to a Shopify page.
- Market saturation: the number of creative texts used by more than one brand.
- Offer language: how many cards mention patterns such as free shipping, a percentage discount, cash on delivery, limited stock and money-back.
- Price points: the Median and the spread of prices read from the ad texts.
If the scan does not have enough cards, Market Signals stays empty. That is not an error; a signal calculated from a few cards would be misleading. If a niche stays empty for this reason, scan again with a broader term or a larger Limit.
3. Read the differences
Once the table is full, the niches start to talk side by side. No single row makes the decision; look at the picture the rows show together.
How dense the competition is. If, at the same Limit, the first five on the Top Advertisers list hold most of a niche's scan, that niche is in the hands of a few big players. If the first five are spread out and each shows up with few ads, the market is split among many small advertisers.
How mature the niche is. If the Ad age distribution stretches towards ads that have been live for a long time, the niche has advertisers who keep their ads running for months; that is usually the sign of a market that works. If the distribution gathers only around new ads, the niche is either new or advertisers do not last long in it.
How fast the pace is. If Creative refresh is high, advertisers keep launching new ads. That shows both a lively market and that you will have to produce new creatives all the time. How to read this measure is covered in detail in our creative refresh rate article.
How much is copied. If Market saturation is high, the same creative text is circulating among several brands. This usually means many stores selling the same product with the same ad. The match is made on the text, not the image. We covered this check for a single product in our product saturation article.
What kind of stores. A niche with a high Shopify rate is a niche where independent stores advertise. If it is low, most ads go to big brands, marketplaces or other platforms.
How they compete. Offer language tells you what the niche competes on. If percentage discounts are everywhere, there is a price war; if free shipping and money-back stand out, competition runs on trust. The median of Price points also shows the price band of the niche: where will your own product price sit in that band?
4. Do not reduce a niche to one number
Turning the table into a score is tempting, but it misleads. Two examples:
- Many ads are not always good. A crowded niche shows proven demand, but it also means your own ad will struggle to stand out.
- Few ads are not always an opportunity. Few advertisers can also mean there is little demand. If there are no long-running ads, nobody may have made money in that niche for long.
Use the table to ask questions, not to pick. "Why is the top five so strong in this niche?", "Why do the ads here live so briefly?" The answers are in the cards. Go back to the one or two niches you picked from the table, click an advertiser's name in Top Advertisers and study their cards one by one.
Repeat
Niches are not static. Scan the niche you picked again a few weeks later with the same settings and add a new column to the table. Creative refresh and Top Advertisers change over time; a decision to enter a niche is sounder when it rests on a trend rather than a single snapshot.
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. Scanning several niches at the same Limit shares out that daily allowance; plan how many niches you compare on the same day with that in mind. You can see the plan details on the pricing page.
To do this with the extension: Facebook ads market research