If a competitor has been running Facebook Ads longer than you, they've already spent money finding out what works — which creatives get clicks, which offers convert, which audiences respond. You can't see their results, but you can see almost everything else: every ad currently running, the landing pages behind them, and roughly how much of their traffic depends on the channel. Here's a step-by-step process for turning that into a usable audit.
Step 1: Check how much a competitor actually relies on Facebook
Before studying their ads, it helps to know whether Facebook is a minor channel for them or the backbone of their traffic. A free traffic-estimation tool like SimilarWeb gives you a rough (not exact) read on this:
- Enter the competitor's domain into SimilarWeb's traffic checker
- Find the traffic-sources breakdown and note what share comes from “Social” overall (this bundles organic and paid together)
- Drill into the social breakdown to see what share of that social traffic is specifically Facebook
- Multiply the two percentages together to estimate Facebook's share of their total traffic
Step 2: Pull every ad they're currently running
Meta's Ad Library is free, requires no login, and shows every active ad on Facebook and Instagram for any advertiser. Search the competitor's Page name, then work through what's visible:
Check who's managing the page
The Page's “About” tab discloses roughly how many people manage it and their general location. A single manager usually means the founder or a generalist is running ads themselves; a large, distributed team usually means social is a channel they're investing in seriously and likely managing through an agency.
Read the ad volume as a budget signal
The total number of currently-running ads tells you how much they're testing and segmenting. Running dozens of variants requires a real budget to keep them all live simultaneously — a high ad count is a reasonable proxy for meaningful ad spend, even without an exact number.
Open individual ads for landing pages and placements
- Click into an ad to see its destination landing page — the URL sometimes reveals campaign structure through UTM parameters (source, medium, campaign name)
- Note which placements each ad targets (Feed, Stories, Reels, Right Column, Instagram, Audience Network)
- Check whether they're using Dynamic Creative (Meta auto-combines multiple headlines/images) versus fixed, single-version ads
- Look at the creative itself: is it built from generic stock photography, or custom-designed graphics and brand-specific photography? Stock-heavy creative usually signals a smaller design budget or an agency working fast across many clients — custom, on-brand design usually signals a bigger, more deliberate spend, and tends to convert better precisely because it doesn't look like every other ad in the feed
Check the political/social-issue filter — even if you're sure they don't qualify
Ads occasionally get classified as political or social-issue content even when they aren't obviously either. It's worth checking this filter specifically, because Meta discloses real spend ranges, reach, and audience demographics for ads in this category — data you otherwise can't see for ordinary commercial ads.
Step 3: Turn what you found into a standing report
A one-off look at a competitor's ads is interesting; a repeatable report format is useful, because you can compare it month to month and actually spot when their strategy shifts. A solid audit template covers:
- Traffic dependence — the Facebook traffic-share estimate from Step 1
- Team signal — how many people manage the page, and whether that suggests in-house or agency management
- Ad volume and countries targeted — a proxy for budget and market focus
- Recurring calls-to-action by funnel stage — what a cold audience is offered versus what a returning visitor or existing customer sees
- Promotions and offers — whether they run frequent discounts/trials or hold steady pricing
- Content vs. direct-response ads — are they promoting blog posts and videos, or pushing straight to a purchase/signup?
- Visible split-tests — near-identical ads launched the same day with one variable changed; this tells you exactly what they're optimising for right now
- Creative format — video vs. static, aspect ratios, and whether creatives are tailored per placement
- Design quality — stock photography vs. custom-designed, on-brand creative; this is often the fastest visible sign of whether ad spend is backed by real design investment
- Landing pages — which URLs get the most ad traffic, and whether that's a dedicated page or the homepage
A quick note on political and social-issue ads
If a competitor does have ads classified this way, Meta's disclosure is unusually detailed — you can see estimated ad spend, reach, impressions, and audience demographics for that specific ad. It's a narrow case (most commercial advertisers won't trigger this classification), but worth checking, since the data quality is far better than anything available for standard ads.
Stock images vs. custom design — what the audit usually reveals
Once you've pulled a competitor's live ads, a pattern shows up fast: the ads that look like they've been running the longest are almost never built from generic stock photography. Stock images are cheap and fast, which is exactly why they're everywhere — and exactly why audiences scroll past them without registering the brand at all. Here are the practical creative tips worth pulling out of that observation:
- If a stock photo could belong to five other brands, it belongs to none of them. The generic laptop-and-coffee shot or the stock “diverse team high-fiving” photo reads as filler, not as your brand — audiences have seen it a hundred times before they see yours.
- Real product, real people, real environment beats polished stock every time. A slightly rougher photo of an actual product or actual customer consistently outperforms a perfect stock image, because it reads as proof rather than decoration.
- Match the ad's design language to the landing page it clicks through to. A mismatch between a stock-photo ad and a custom-designed landing page (or vice versa) creates a moment of doubt right when you need trust the most.
- Brand colour and type consistency is a cheap win most competitors skip. If you notice a competitor's ads don't consistently use their own brand palette or fonts, that's a gap you can exploit simply by being consistent yourself.
- Design for the placement, not just the message. A static image built for Feed rarely works well cropped into a 9:16 Story or Reel — competitors who reuse one asset everywhere are usually leaving performance on the table.
- Where a stock photo is unavoidable (budget, timeline), choose specificity over generic-ness. A stock photo of a specific, relatable moment beats an abstract, glossy lifestyle shot almost every time.
This kind of structured competitor research is exactly the sort of practical skill covered hands-on in Unlearn Academy's Digital Marketing course — alongside running the campaigns themselves, not just auditing someone else's. And if the audit keeps turning up the same finding — that the ads winning attention are custom-designed rather than built from stock photos — that's a design skills gap, not just a marketing one. See the Digital Marketing course or the Graphic Design course →