How to see your competitors' Facebook and Google ads.

The quickest way to see them

Both libraries work in an ordinary phone browser, and neither needs an account:

• Facebook and Instagram: go to facebook.com/ads/library, set the country, choose All ads as the category and type the business name. Pick the business from the suggestions to see only its ads.
• Google: go to adstransparency.google.com, choose the region, and type the business name or its website address.
• Look at the start date, the platforms and the number of versions of each ad, then open the details of the ones that matter.

Do this for the three or four businesses your customers compare you with, not for every name in your trade. The aim is to understand what your customers see before they reach you.

Meta Ad Library, step by step on a phone

The Ad Library covers ads running across Meta's apps, including Facebook and Instagram. On a phone:

• Open facebook.com/ads/library in Safari or Chrome. You do not need to be logged in, although reporting an ad and viewing adult content need an account.
• Choose the country where the competitor advertises. The library shows ads by country, so a business near a border may need two searches.
• Under ad category, choose All ads.
• Type the business name and pick it from the list of advertisers that appears, or search a phrase such as "boiler service" to see every advertiser using it.
• Use Filters to narrow by language, advertiser, platform, media type, active or inactive, and the dates the ad was shown.

Each result card shows whether the ad is active, its Library ID, the date it started running, the platforms it ran on and whether it has several versions. Tap See ad details, or See summary details when several ads share the same text and picture, for the full view. Meta says an ad appears in the library within 24 hours of its first impression, and changes to it show within 24 hours too.

What Meta shows, and what it hides

What you can see depends on the kind of ad and where it ran:

• Every ad running now, anywhere: the ad itself, when it started and who is running it.
• Ads about social issues, elections or politics: kept for seven years, with ranges for spend and reach, and who paid.
• Ads shown anywhere in the EU or the UK: kept for a year after they last appeared, with extra transparency for those regions.

For EU ads, the extra detail is the useful part. Open See ad details, then Transparency by location, and you can see the locations the advertiser targeted, down to postcodes and cities, the age range, the gender setting and an estimate of how many accounts in the EU saw the ad, broken down by location, age and gender. The same screen names the advertiser and the payer.

What Meta does not show for ordinary business ads is the spend, the clicks or the results. An ad that has run for months tells you the competitor has not switched it off, which is a hint that it works for them, not proof. Outside the EU and the UK, once an ordinary ad stops running it leaves the library, so check regularly if you want a record.

Two small signs are worth reading. An ad marked as having multiple versions means the competitor is trying different pictures or wording for the same offer, so they are paying attention. And when several ads share the same text and picture, Meta groups them, which can mean the same ad is running in more than one campaign or area.

A monthly check you can repeat

Looking once tells you little. Looking every month shows you what changes, which is where the useful information is. Keep a simple sheet with one row per ad you find:

• The competitor, the platform and the date you checked.
• The offer or message in one line, in their words.
• The date the ad started, and whether it is still running.
• For EU ads, the towns or postcodes it was aimed at.
• A screenshot saved in a folder with the date in the file name.

After a few months, patterns appear: who advertises before every bank holiday, who stops in winter, who keeps one ad running all year and who changes offers every fortnight. Those patterns tell you when your market is crowded and when it goes quiet, and a quiet week is a good time for your own ad to stand out.

Keep the sheet to the businesses your customers really compare you with. A national chain's ads say little about what a family firm two streets away should do.

Google Ads Transparency Center, step by step

Google's library covers ads on Search, YouTube, Maps, Shopping and Play:

• Open adstransparency.google.com in your phone's browser.
• Choose the region from the menu next to the search box, or anywhere.
• Search by the advertiser's name or by their website. The website search is often the better one, because it lists every advertiser account whose ads point to that site, and the verified name can differ from the name on the shopfront.
• On the results, filter by date, by platform and by format.
• Open an ad to see its versions and, where Google provides them, the regions and dates it was shown.

Google includes ads from verified advertisers for a year after an ad was last shown, plus ads from unverified advertisers in Europe and Türkiye. It shows up to five common versions of an ad, and says information can take 48 to 72 hours to appear after an ad first runs.

What Google shows, and what it hides

Google shows the ad, the advertiser's name, the payer's name if it differs, and when and where the ad ran. Ads shown in Europe, in Türkiye and political ads carry extra information, such as the ad's topic and more about the audience it was aimed at.

It does not show the keywords a competitor bids on, what they pay, or which searches show their ads. You also cannot click through to the page an ad leads to: Google turned that off for good, and the ads now appear as pictures.

To see which searches a competitor appears for in your area, search the way a customer would and look at the ads, without clicking them. Clicking a competitor's ads on purpose is what Google calls an invalid click, and its systems work to filter those out, so you are more likely to waste your own time than cost them anything: click fraud on Google Ads explains how Google handles it.

What to learn from their ads

Work through each competitor's ads with these questions, and write the answers down:

• What do they lead with: price, speed, quality, reviews, a promise about the work, a named person?
• Which services do they advertise most? That can point at where their margin is, or where they have spare capacity.
• When do their ads start and stop? Start dates across a year show when they push seasonal work.
• What words do they use for the service? If three competitors say "end of tenancy" and you say "move-out", check which one your customers type.
• Where are they aiming? EU transparency shows the postcodes and towns, which tells you whose patch overlaps with yours.
• What do they leave out? If none mentions evening appointments, parking or how the price is worked out, that is room for you.
• What format do they use, video or photos, and do the pictures show real work or stock images?

Then visit their website directly and look at the page the ad would open, as a customer. A strong ad with a weak page is a competitor you can beat on the page.

Learn from them without copying

The point is to understand the choice your customers face, not to make your ads look like theirs. Copying hurts you in three ways: it makes you look the same as the business next door, it can break copyright and trademark law, and Meta and Google both have rules against ads that infringe someone else's rights.

• Never reuse their photos, videos, logo or wording, even with changes.
• Do not put a competitor's name in your ad text.
• Do not copy an offer you cannot afford to honour. A competitor may run a loss-making offer to fill quiet weeks, and you cannot see their costs.
• Do not claim what you cannot prove, such as being the busiest or the cheapest in town.

Make your ad from your own facts instead: real photos of your work, your actual reviews, the area you really cover and the thing customers say about you that nobody else can claim.

A dentist checks three competitors

A dental clinic in Germany plans a campaign for new patients and searches its three nearest competitors in the Ad Library and the Ads Transparency Center:

• The first has run the same whitening offer on Instagram since spring, in several versions, aimed at the postcodes around both practices.
• The second runs nothing on Meta, but its Google ads appear for emergency dental searches in the town.
• The third runs short videos of its team and its new treatment rooms, with no prices at all.

Nobody mentions evening appointments, which this clinic offers three nights a week, and nobody shows how a first visit works. The clinic leads its own ads with evening appointments and a short video of what happens at a first visit, and leaves the whitening price war to the first competitor. It also sees the second competitor owns emergency searches, so it adds an emergency page before running search ads of its own.

Ads for dental and medical services also have Meta rules of their own: see Meta ads for clinics.

Check your own ads while you are there

Search your own business in both libraries:

• See your ads the way strangers see them, out of context and next to everyone else's.
• Check that old offers have stopped. An ad for a deal that ended in March should not still be running in June.
• Check the advertiser and payer names. If the payer is an agency or a former supplier, find out why.
• Look for ads you did not create that use your name or logo. On Google, open the ad and use Report this ad. On Meta, reporting needs a logged-in account.

If an agency runs your ads, the library is also a quick way to see what is live without asking for a login.

Mistakes when studying competitors' ads

• Assuming a running ad is profitable. It may be, or the owner may never look at the numbers.
• Copying an offer without knowing what it costs the competitor to give it.
• Changing your own ads every time a competitor changes theirs.
• Studying the ads and ignoring the page and the reviews behind them, which often decide who gets the call.
• Clicking their ads to cost them money. Google filters such clicks, and it is a poor use of an afternoon.
• Checking one country when you work near a border.

Once you know what customers see, build the page your ad will open: before you run ads covers what it needs, and Google Ads or Facebook ads helps you pick the platform. GGSites builds landing pages for ads and does not run campaigns. For what a page costs, see the prices page, and for the whole site behind it, websites.