Looking at a competitor's ads once gives you a snapshot: what is live today. The real question is about movement: what started this week, what stopped, and what is still running? A new offer, a new product page or a batch of ads that appear at once tells you the competitor is trying something. To see it, you need to open the same search regularly, with the same settings.
The Meta Ad Library does not tell you when a competitor launches a new ad. That is why tracking is a routine: one search per competitor, the same check every week, and a note in the same place. This article shows how to set that routine up.
1. One search link per competitor
The Ad Library carries every search setting in the address bar: term, country, status, media type, platform and language. If you build the link once and keep it, instead of rebuilding the search from the menus every week, your tracking list becomes a list of links.
Build the link with our search link builder. It is free, needs no sign-up and runs in your browser:
- Search Term: the competitor's brand name or page name.
- Search Type: if the brand name has more than one word, Exact Phrase searches the phrase as a whole and usually gives a narrower result.
- Target Country: the market the competitor sells in. If you track several markets, build one link per country; that is the only way to see the difference between them.
- Status: Active. In a weekly check, what matters is what is live right now.
- Media Type, Platform and Content Language: only pick these if you really want to narrow the search; a filter you leave empty is not added to the link.
Leave the Start Date and End Date boxes empty. A date is written into the link as a fixed value; a date that is "recent" today goes stale in a few weeks, and your link quietly starts opening the wrong range. We will read what is new from the sort order below, not from dates.
Press Copy link and keep the link. A bookmarks folder called "Competitors" is the shortest way; if you work in a team, you can also put the links in a shared document. Everyone who opens a link sees the same search with the same settings.
2. What happens when you open the link?
The link opens the Ad Library with the settings you picked. If AdVantage Scope is installed, the same settings appear in the summary strip at the top of the page, and the Meta Search section of the side panel reads them from the address. If you want to change a setting for one week, change it in the panel and press Search on Meta; the link itself stays the same.
3. The weekly check: same order, every week
The routine is valuable because it is identical. If you follow the same steps in the same order every week, you can really compare two weeks.
Load the list. The library shows the list piece by piece as you scroll. Run Auto Scan with Start scan in the bottom bar; the page scrolls for you and every ad becomes a card with its days running and stage. How to tell whether the list has really ended is covered in how to see all of a competitor's ads.
Sort newest first. In the card filters, set Sort to Newest Published. The cards at the top are the ads the competitor launched most recently. Compare them with last week's note: is there a new creative, a new headline or a new landing address?
Show only the new ones. In the Stage filter, pick Testing. Only the ads that have just gone live stay on screen. This is the list of ideas the competitor is testing right now. A week later, checking how many of them are still live tells you which ideas held.
Write down one number. The Creative refresh row in the Market Signals section counts how many ads in the scan started recently; the range is written right next to the label. If you note this number from the same search every week, you see which weeks the competitor launched more new ads. How to read this measure is covered in detail in our creative refresh rate article.
Sort and Stage are card filters: they work only on the cards on screen and send no new request to Meta. You do not have to rebuild the search.
4. Reading what changed
At the end of the weekly check, look for answers to three questions:
- What started? The top of the Newest Published sort and the cards in the Testing stage. If there are several new versions of the same creative, the competitor is testing one idea with different headlines.
- What is still running? Are the new ads you noted last week still on the list this week? An idea that holds moves down from the top as the weeks pass, but it does not leave the list.
- What stopped? Your link opens Active ads; an ad that was there last week and is gone this week has been switched off. To be sure, set Status to All in the panel and search again: stopped ads come back into the list, and those past the test phase show the Ended badge.
A stopped ad is information too. If the competitor tried an offer for two weeks and dropped it, you have one reason less to try that offer yourself.
5. Keep the weeks in one place
If the notes do not pile up in one place, the routine falls apart after a few weeks. The simplest way is a one-line weekly note per competitor: date, number of new ads, the new idea that stood out.
The extension's Google Sheets Integration is in the Starter plan. With Send All Ads on Screen to Sheets, you can send the cards that pass your filters to the spreadsheet the extension created in your Google account in one go. Rows are added to the end of the sheet; the columns are Brand, Domain, CTA, Days running, URL, Shopify type and Saved on, which holds the day you sent the rows. If you send to the same spreadsheet every week, that date column separates the weeks.
If you want to turn the tracking into a monthly report for a client or your team, these weekly notes are the raw material. You can find the report skeleton in our competitor ad report template.
Keep the routine short
As the tracking list grows, the weekly check gets longer and after a while it gets skipped. Start with a few competitors, build one link for each, and follow the same order every week. If a competitor changes nothing for several weeks, move it to the end of the list; the competitors that change often stay at the top.
Cost
The Ad Library and the search link builder are 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. You can see which feature is in which plan on the pricing page.
To do this with the extension: Meta Ad Library search link builder