Brian J. Stewart
Spy on your competitors.
Your competitors are showing you which ads make them money. Here's how to find them.
Nobody keeps paying for an ad that isn't working. That's the whole trick.
A business that watches its numbers kills a losing ad fast. So the ads that have been running for months, in several versions, are the ones paying for themselves. Four steps from finding them to running your own.
- Step 1
Open Meta's Ad Library
Free, public, no login. Every ad running on Facebook and Instagram is listed, with the date each one started. Set your country, choose All ads, and search the competitor by name. - Step 2
Find what's still running
Look for two marks on each card: an old start date, and several versions live. A business that watches its numbers kills a losing ad fast, so one that has run for months and been remade several times is very likely paying for itself. - Step 3
Write down the structure, not the words
Copying an ad is lazy and it doesn't work; their audience knows them, yours doesn't. What transfers is the structure. For each winner, note the enemy it positions against, the proof it leans on, the format, the offer and the ask. - Step 4
Rebuild it with your own material
Keep the notes, replace every detail with something true about your business. Make two or three versions, one thing different in each, with a decision rule written down before launch. Run it as a real test.
The guide is one of the procedures my fleet runs. The rest of the library is open to read, and signing up above gets you the installable ones as files. See the skills library