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Competitor monitoringDemo on public data · Myprotein, GymBeam, ESN · Meta Ad Library

What your competitors launch on Meta, tracked every day.

Checking the Meta Ad Library by hand takes an afternoon and shows you a single moment. We built a dashboard that collects every ad your competitors run, every day, and answers the questions that matter: how many they launch, which ones they keep, who they target and where their reach is moving.

The result

Three sports-nutrition brands, three different strategies, visible at a glance: GymBeam tests at volume, Myprotein keeps its winners running for months, and ESN puts its budget behind a handful of ads with the widest reach.

Competitor ads tracked in March
759
More ads launched by GymBeam than Myprotein
5×
Average days an ad runs: Myprotein vs GymBeam
67 vs 17
New, paused and reach changes, every day
Daily
The live dashboard.Click through the tabs: Top-level view, Daily check and Top performers. Open it full screen ↗

The question

Every performance team keeps an eye on competitors. In practice that means someone opens the Meta Ad Library now and then, scrolls through a few ads and takes screenshots. You see what is live today, but not how many ads they launched this week, which ones they quietly switched off, or which ones they keep paying to run.

Those are the signals worth having. An ad a competitor keeps running for two months is almost certainly working. A sudden wave of new ads usually means a new offer or a new push.

What we built

  1. Collect. A script pulls every active ad for the brands you choose from the Meta Ad Library API, which is public and free. It runs daily into a Google Sheet.
  2. Track change. Meta only reports an ad’s total reach since launch. Storing a snapshot each day lets the dashboard subtract yesterday from today and show whether a competitor is spending more or less.
  3. Visualise. One self-contained dashboard with four views: how to read it, the top-level comparison, the daily check, and the top performers.
  4. Share. It is a single file, so the team opens it like a link. No logins, no seats.

What it showed

On the demo set, three brands selling the same kind of product run Meta in three very different ways.

BrandAds launchedAvg. days runningReach
GymBeam
Tests at volume
550
17.2
5.6M
Myprotein
Keeps winners running
115
66.8
23.6M
ESN
Puts budget behind a few ads
94
30.4
32.3M
Figure 1.Ads launched, how long they run and the reach behind them, 1–31 March 2026. Reach is the EU reach Meta reports in the Ad Library.
  • GymBeam launches five times as many ads as Myprotein, and most are switched off within a few weeks. That is a testing machine: many ideas, fast cuts.
  • Myprotein keeps ads running for over two months on average. Fewer launches, longer lives: they scale what already works.
  • ESN runs the fewest ads but reaches the most people. A small set of ads carries most of the budget.

How teams use it

  • Spot winning creatives early: the ads competitors keep running for weeks.
  • Catch launches the same day: the daily timeline shows when each competitor pushes new creative.
  • Compare targeting side by side: country, age, gender, format and placement in one view.
  • Brief the creative team: turn what competitors lean on into the angles you test next, together with creative angle analysis.

We set it up for your competitor set and keep it running. The same dashboard is also available as a free do-it-yourself skill on adsrepo.