Competitor ad research: start with the public libraries

Large platforms are required to publish the ads they are running, so you can see a competitor's copy, landing page and start date for free. What no platform publishes is spend. That is why the single most useful metric in ad research is how long an ad has been alive, not its budget.

Where to start

You want to see what one brand is running. Read see the ads a competitor is running.

You want content ideas for your industry. Read what to look for in the TikTok ad library.

You want to know which number to read first. Read a long-running ad is a profitable ad.

Two tools, two shapes of data

This is where people get confused, including in other articles online:

The radar searches Meta and Google by default; LinkedIn is opt-in, because LinkedIn's library often returns advertisers unrelated to the query. Results are filtered to keep only ads containing every word of your query, so you may get fewer than 60 — and that is deliberate.

There are no TikTok ads by brand name. TikTok's own Commercial Content Library covers only the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland, so no public source exists for a Vietnamese brand's TikTok ads. Anyone promising that is promising something that does not exist.

Three things you can read and three you cannot

You can read: copy and creative, landing page, start date, and whether the ad is still running.

You cannot read: spend, click-through rate, revenue. Every competitor budget figure you meet anywhere is a guess, and planning on it is planning on sand.

Frequently asked questions

Is looking at competitor ads legal? Yes. This is data the platforms publish themselves under ad transparency rules. You are reading what anybody can open.

Can I do it free myself? Yes. All three libraries are free. Credits buy you not opening three tabs, deduplicating by hand and copying into a spreadsheet every month.

Can I copy a competitor's creative outright? You should not, and with video it is also a copyright question. Learning the structure is fine; copying the file is not — see downloading TikTok videos and when it is allowed.