How to spy on competitor ads (free + paid)
You're not going to invent a winning ad. Nobody does on the first try. What you are going to do is find ads that are already winning — proven by the fact that they're still running and still spending — and reproduce their angle with your own creative.
Free · Facebook Ad Library
facebook.com/ads/library is the official, free, complete database of every ad currently running on Facebook. Search by keyword or by advertiser. Filter by country, ad type (image/video), and platform (Facebook/Instagram).
How to use it:
- Search the niche or competitor brand name. Example: "blood sugar", "Gluco6", "alpilean".
- Filter to Active only. An ad still running is an ad making money — Facebook would have killed it on policy or the advertiser on cost otherwise.
- Click the ad → see the launch date. Older = better. An ad live for 60+ days is almost certainly profitable. An ad live for 6 months is a goldmine.
- Save the creative (right-click → save video / image), the headline, the primary text, and the destination URL. That's your reference set.
What the Ad Library doesn't show you
- How much the ad is spending.
- Who it's targeting (unless it's political).
- Performance metrics.
You infer those from longevity and from how many variations of the same ad the advertiser is running.
Paid · spy tools
For $50–$150/month, paid spy tools (AdSpy, BigSpy, PowerAdSpy, Anstrex) add:
- Engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares) for every ad they've crawled.
- Historical view — ads that ran and stopped, not just current.
- Landing-page snapshots — see the actual lander a competitor sent to.
- Filter by network — show me only ads pointing to Clickbank hop links.
For your first niche you don't need a paid tool. Ad Library is enough to find 5–10 reference ads. Subscribe to a paid tool only when you've validated a niche and want to mine it deeply.
What to extract from each spied ad
For every reference ad you save, write down:
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Hook (first 3 seconds of video, or headline of image) | This is what stops the scroll. The single most important variable. |
| Angle (the emotional / logical reason this offer is positioned this way) | e.g. "weight loss as a hormone problem, not a willpower problem" |
| Proof element (testimonial, study, before/after, doctor reference) | What they're using to make the claim believable. |
| CTA framing (urgency, scarcity, free quiz, free guide, low-ticket trial) | How they handle the click-through. |
| Pre-lander style (article, quiz, VSL, direct-to-offer) | What's between the ad and the offer page. |
Turning angles into your own creative
Once you have 5+ reference ads in a niche, you'll see patterns. Three or four hooks repeat. One or two angles dominate. That convergence is the answer to "what works in this niche right now."
Your job:
- Pick the strongest angle from the cluster.
- Write 3 new hooks for that angle. Don't be clever — the proven hook structure is the point.
- Shoot or render new visuals. Stock footage + voice-over works. Faceless. UGC-style on your phone works. AI-generated avatars are increasingly fine.
- Match the pre-lander style. If winners use quizzes, build a quiz. If winners use long-form articles, build an article.
How the operator does this for you
spy_fb_ad_library(query, country="US", max_results=25)— opens the Ad Library in the headed Chromium (so it gets the same results a logged-out human would), scrolls through results, returns the page text + ad URLs.spy_download_creative(url)— downloads the image/video file to./creatives/for later reference.
Inside the operator loop, a typical Module 04 step looks like: "spy → cluster by hook → pick angle → hand off to Module 05's lander builder." The agent narrates each step before calling the tool.