See the ads a competitor is running: Facebook, Google, LinkedIn

Facebook, Instagram and Google all publish the ads currently running in their ad libraries, viewable free and without an account. You see the copy, the landing page, the start date and whether an ad is still alive. What is nowhere is spend. The longer an ad has been running, the more likely it is profitable.

Three libraries, three shapes of data

Library	Covers	Tells you	Missing
Meta Ad Library	Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network	copy, image/video, landing page, start date, still running or not	spend, click-through rate
Google Ads Transparency Center	Google ads	payer, format, last shown	spend; data window roughly 30 days
TikTok Commercial Content Library	EEA, UK and Switzerland only	advertiser name, creative, first and last shown, targeting criteria, reach ranges	spend, click-through rate, and everything outside Europe

Meta's library is open at its own address with no login. TikTok's library holds ads published from 1 October 2022 onward and keeps each ad for one year after it was last shown.

Sources: a comparison of seven ad libraries and TikTok's guide to accessing the Commercial Content Library, both accessed 21/09/2026.

The practical consequence for a seller in Vietnam: there is no way to look up a Vietnamese brand's TikTok ads by name, because TikTok's library does not cover this market. Anyone promising that is promising something that does not exist.

What to read in an ad library

Run time first. An ad that has been live for three months is paying for itself. An ad that lived four days and vanished was a failed test. Sorting by days running is the fastest way to see what a competitor trusts.

How many variants of the same creative. Several variants means they are running a real A/B test on that angle, not posting for the sake of it.

The landing page. Does the ad go to the homepage or to a dedicated product page? A dedicated page almost always means somebody is measuring conversion.

The first three seconds of the video. This is the part you can learn from directly, without guessing at budgets.

What you cannot read: spend, true impressions in most markets, click-through rate and revenue. Every competitor budget figure you see anywhere is speculation. Do not build plans on it.

How long it takes by hand

Open three libraries, type the brand name into each, filter by country, scroll the list, open each ad to see its start date, then copy it all into a spreadsheet. For one brand, about half an hour. For a list of five competitors, done monthly, that is an afternoon a month.

The slowest part is not finding ads but deduplicating: the same creative usually appears several times under different ad IDs.

Merging three libraries in one search

Multi-platform ad radar takes a brand name or a keyword and returns ads running in Vietnam on Meta, Google and LinkedIn. One run costs 20 credits and returns up to 60 ads, longest-running first, with variants of the same creative already merged.

Four things to know before you run it:

• It searches Meta and Google by default. LinkedIn is opt-in, because its library often returns advertisers unrelated to the query.
• Results are filtered again. Only ads containing every word of the query are kept, because the libraries pad thin results with other advertisers. That means you may get fewer than 60 ads, and that is deliberate.
• It runs in the background, about a minute. You submit the request and come back for the result.
• No TikTok. For the reason above. To see TikTok ads, use the ads library at 15 credits, but it returns top ads by country and industry, not a lookup by brand name.

The data comes from the platforms' own public libraries, and it is an estimate from public data — exactly what the platforms choose to show, no more.

A 30-minute monthly routine

1. Run the radar for each competitor on your list. Note which ads are new since last month.
2. For every ad alive more than 60 days, save the creative and landing page to a folder.
3. Open the three most-used landing pages and note the headline and call to action.
4. Pick exactly one hypothesis to test this month, instead of copying a batch.

Step four is the one people skip. A creative library nobody uses is just a folder of images.

Frequently asked questions

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

Can I tell how much they spend? No. No library publishes spend for ordinary commercial advertising. The closest substitutes are run time and variant count.

Why can't I look up a Vietnamese shop's TikTok ads? TikTok's ad library covers only the EEA, the UK and Switzerland. No public source exists for TikTok ads in Vietnam by brand name.

Can I do it free myself? Yes, all three libraries are free. Paying means not opening three tabs, deduplicating by hand and copying into a spreadsheet each month.

Can I search by industry keyword instead of brand name? Yes, and it usually returns more. But results are filtered harder, because the filter requires the ad to contain every word of the query.

For more on this topic see Ad research. If you are weighing paid ads against creator bookings, how to calculate TikTok engagement rate covers the other side.