Meta Ad Library vs Ads Radar: what each shows about competitor ads in the EU

Short answer: use the Meta Ad Library for a quick look at what a page is running right now, in any country. Use Ads Radar when you want to follow competitors in the EU over time: what is new, what stopped and what is growing each week, with reach summed up by country, age and gender.

Ads Radar is not a replacement for the Ad Library. It reads the same public data through Meta's official Ad Library API, so the two always agree on which ads exist.

What the Meta Ad Library gives you

The Ad Library is Meta's public archive of ads on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network. It is free, and you don't need an account to use it.

• Every active ad of any page, in any country. You can search by page or keyword and filter by country, platform, media type and date.
• Extra detail for ads shown in the EU. Because of the EU Digital Services Act, ads delivered in the European Union also show Meta's estimated reach and a breakdown by country, age and gender. Ads that are no longer running stay visible for a year.
• Political and issue ads everywhere, with spend and impressions ranges.

What it does not do:

• It has no memory of changes. You see each ad as it is today. Nothing tells you that a competitor launched 12 new ads since last Monday, stopped 5 or rewrote a headline.
• It doesn't add things up. Reach is shown ad by ad. To learn where a brand's ads mostly run, or which age group they reach, you have to open every ad and add the numbers yourself.
• There are no alerts or reports. You have to remember to go back and check.

What Ads Radar adds

Ads Radar collects a page's ads from the Ad Library API and keeps a history of every ad it has seen.

• An instant analysis in about a minute. Paste a page link and you get up to 100 ads from the last 30 days, sorted by reach, with no signup.
• Totals for the page. EU reach is summed by country, age and gender, so you can see at a glance where and to whom a brand advertises. See the public brand pages for examples.
• A weekly report every Monday by email: new ads, stopped ads, ads whose text changed and ads whose reach is growing, as a PDF (and Excel if you want it).
• Test ideas that always point to the competitor ads they are based on.

Side by side

Which one should you use?

• One-off look at a competitor, or a market outside the EU: the Meta Ad Library is enough, and it is the only option outside Europe.
• Ongoing monitoring of competitors that advertise in the EU: Ads Radar saves the weekly manual check and shows changes the Ad Library does not keep.

Most teams use both: Ads Radar to notice what changed, and the Ad Library link on each ad to look at the creative in full.

Analyse a competitor's ads for free