How to analyze competitors’ ad creatives when there are thousands of them

There is no shortage of tools for looking at competitors’ ads, paid and free. Most of them support the same routine:

1. Find the competitor’s Facebook pages.
2. Scroll through their creatives.
3. Sort by impressions — the higher a creative ranks, the more it has been shown.
4. Count copies and near-duplicates — the harder an advertiser multiplies a creative, the more likely it works.

Where the manual routine breaks

1. There are too many creatives. A big web2app advertiser launches thousands of ads a month. Nobody can watch them all.
2. Some metrics are hidden. Take EU reach — how many people in the EU saw an ad. The Meta Ad Library shows it inside each ad, but you cannot sort by it.

   Collect it for every ad and you get a ranking by EU reach. Collect it every day and you get something more useful: reach gained per day, which surfaces the creatives being scaled right now.

3. It has to be repeated. Even if you assemble all of that by hand once, you cannot redo it daily. A collector can — automatically, on every advertiser.

What AdSpyLab does instead

• Collects every creative in the Meta Ad Library for the brands we track.
• Reads each one — speech, on-screen text, visuals — and extracts what it says and how.
• Groups near-identical creatives into families: one concept with all its hooks, edits, actors and languages.
• Computes metrics per creative and for the family as a whole.

Two more:

Analysing families instead of single ads changes the picture: every iteration of an idea is counted together, so what actually works stands out at once.

The signals I check

• Many copies — the advertiser keeps re-launching it.
• Top by EU reach — it has already been shown at scale.
• Top by EU reach gained — it is being scaled right now.
• Rank in the Ad Library sorted by impressions, and how that rank moves.
• Survival — of the creatives launched, how many are still active after 7 and 14 days. Losers get switched off fast; survivors are spending.

Search creatives by meaning

Because every creative is read, it is also searchable. We transcribe every video, pull the text from every frame and image, and describe the creative with an LLM.

So you can search not just by keyword but by what an ad is about, in any language — the query and the ad do not have to share one.

Read next: how to spot growing niches and competitors early by counting their ads. Or browse the open monthly web2app ad market report, niche pages and brand cards.