Master the Facebook ad library with proprietary data from 1.7 million campaigns. Learn how to track ad longevity, spot hidden winners, and fully automate your creative testing.
The Facebook ad library is Meta's official public database displaying active advertisements across all its platforms. You can search by advertiser name or keyword to view active creatives, ad copy, and launch dates.
Media buyers use this tool to monitor competitors and reverse engineer profitable campaigns, making it a foundational tool for modern digital advertising.
In 2026, algorithmic targeting handles the heavy lifting for media buyers. You no longer spend hours tweaking detailed interest targeting or building complex lookalike audiences.
The algorithm finds the buyers automatically, provided you feed it the right creative.
Because the creative now dictates the targeting, competitive intelligence is more important than ever. You must know exactly what visual hooks and copywriting frameworks your competitors are deploying to capture market share.
If you are running direct response campaigns, your top competitors are actively testing dozens of video variations daily. Keeping track of this massive output manually is impossible.
You need a systemic approach to index their creative choices, log their active durations, and isolate the precise elements that trigger conversions.
Meta provides baseline transparency tools for consumers, but the native platform intentionally hides inactive commercial campaigns. The native Facebook Meta ad library has a massive blind spot for direct response marketers.
It immediately removes commercial ads from the public database the moment an advertiser turns them off. You only see what is spending money today. You cannot see what failed yesterday.
You also cannot see spend data, impression volume, or how many times an advertiser launched the exact same creative over a specific timeframe. This lack of historical data prevents you from calculating true ad longevity.
Without knowing if an ad survived the initial testing phase, you might blindly copy a competitor's losing campaign. If a brand launches ten ads on Monday and turns off nine on Wednesday, the native tool only shows you the sole survivor. It does not tell you it was the only winner out of a massive batch.
At our product Crush, we bypass Meta's native limitations by archiving complete ad histories continuously. We capture the metrics that professional media buyers actually need to scale accounts.
Crush's ad library tracks 1,723,246 unique Facebook ads (449,194 currently active). We maintain the full historical record, including ads that were taken down by the advertiser or removed by the platform.
Crush's ad library tracks 1,723,246 unique Facebook ads, providing the historical longevity data that Meta intentionally hides from commercial advertisers.
To understand what actually works in 2026, we isolated a specific segment of our database. We found that 1,426 tracked ads match "search" (463 active right now).
The longevity data on these campaigns tells a definitive story. Among top "search" ads, average run time is 164 days. More importantly, 158 of the top 400 ran 90+ days (the "proven winner" threshold).
No media buyer leaves a losing ad on for three uninterrupted months. We also analyzed the call to action buttons driving these specific campaigns. If you want users to take action, your button must match their psychological intent.
Here are the most common CTA buttons on "search" ads based on our proprietary dataset:
| CTA Button | Frequency | Media Buyer Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Learn more | 37% | Best for low friction curiosity clicks |
| See details | 12% | Best for specific product configurations |
| Apply now | 12% | Best for recruitment or program leads |
"Learn more" dominates the space because it carries the lowest barrier to entry. It asks for exploration rather than a hard financial commitment.
A standard native Facebook ad library search only shows you the front end of a campaign. Our tracking reveals the actual lifespan and duplication metrics of these creatives.
Here are five proven Facebook advertising examples from our database, showing that great copy and clear value propositions can run for years without fatiguing.
Software advertisements typically fatigue quickly due to audience saturation in niche markets. This B2B campaign defies all normal benchmarks. The DataCork ad is running 2,124 days.
It was relaunched 1× and uses the CTA "download". Nearly six years of continuous spend indicates a perfectly dialed-in cost per acquisition that the algorithm can maintain indefinitely.
This e-commerce campaign ran 1,416 days, relaunched 0×, CTA "like page".
The opening line is brilliant: "Computers, gaming systems, electronics and more, all at Goodwill prices! The best part? Your purchases do good! Proceeds from our sales fund career training cou".
It works effectively because it pairs a strong inventory pattern interrupt with a charitable mission, justifying the purchase instantly.
This recruitment ad ran 1,317 days, relaunched 0×, CTA "apply now".
The opening line is purely transactional: "Register with us now and get the latest job alerts sent straight to your inbox." Straightforward utility always wins in the competitive job search market.
This regional employment platform ad is running 1,263 days, relaunched 0×, CTA "learn more".
The opening line establishes instant market authority: "PNGworkforce.com - Papua New Guinea's 1st truly dedicated JOB SEARCH WEBSITE. Visit www.PNGworkforce.com on your Mobile or Computer for JOB OPPORTUNITIES."
Mobile application install campaigns usually burn out in weeks due to high ad frequency. This ad ran 1,117 days, relaunched 0×, CTA "install mobile app".
The opening line speaks directly to the local market with precise clarity: "ကုမ္ပဏီတိုက္ရိုက္အလုပ္အကိုင္အခွင့္အလမ္းအသစ္များကို တစ္နေရာထဲမှာသိနိုင္ရန္၊ Alote app ကို ဒီနေ့ပဲ download လုပ္လိုက္ပာ။" Localized language combined with a direct CTA creates unbeatable relevance.
Finding competitor ads is easy, but knowing which ones to model requires a strict analytical framework. You must look past the flashy production value and focus on structural media buying signals to build a high-converting AI Facebook ad.
Most marketers completely misuse competitive intelligence by focusing on the wrong metrics. They copy the wrong assets and ultimately waste their advertising budget. Here are the most common errors to avoid:
Media buyers often waste hours trying to save videos locally. They search for browser extensions or a dedicated Facebook ad library downloader to rip video files directly to their hard drives.
This approach is completely obsolete in 2026. Manual downloading is tedious, and third-party browser extensions break frequently when Facebook updates its core code.
Most importantly, downloaded files lose their vital metadata. When you save an mp4 file manually, you lose the launch date, the advertiser details, and the ability to track if the ad is still active next month.
Instead of downloading files one by one, you need an automated archive that updates in real time. You can view our free public ad library live at trycrush.ai/ad-library. We handle the storage and the metadata tracking so you can focus entirely on media buying strategy.
Advanced marketers naturally want programmatic access to competitor data. They look for ways to plug into the official Facebook ad library API to populate their own internal dashboards or tracking spreadsheets.
Meta heavily restricts this official access point. The API is primarily designed for academic researchers, journalists, and watchdog groups analyzing political spending and social issues.
Commercial advertisers cannot easily use the native API to pull creative files for e-commerce or lead generation competitors. The data returned for commercial ads is highly limited, offering no spend ranges or demographic breakdowns.
You will face strict rate limits or outright application rejection if you attempt to build a commercial scraping tool via their official portal. This is precisely why professional media buyers rely on specialized platforms. We manage the complex data collection architecture in the background so you have immediate access to actionable insights.
Finding a winning reference ad in the market is only the first step in building a profitable account. You still have to produce your own creative variations, build the campaign structure in Ads Manager, and manage the daily budget.
Crush (trycrush.ai) is an AI Facebook-ads platform built to eliminate that manual labor. Our platform handles the entire lifecycle of a campaign from creative generation to automated bidding, helping you stop being a traditional media buyer and start working as an AI architect.
Once you identify a high-performing asset in our database, you do not have to brief a design team from scratch. Crush can generate ad-creative iterations from a winning reference ad directly within the platform.
This feature allows you to test multiple variations of a proven concept in minutes rather than waiting weeks for a creative agency to deliver new assets. If you are exploring enterprise platforms for scaling creative production across multiple channels, reading our Smartly io review can help you evaluate costs, features, and alternatives.
Our platform fully automatically runs Facebook ads. It creates campaigns based on your best creatives and monitors the financial results around the clock without requiring human intervention.
The system autonomously scales winners that hit your target metrics. Simultaneously, it kills losers before they can drain your daily budget. Say your target CPA is $50, the AI ensures your budget is exclusively allocated to the ads meeting or beating that exact goal.
You cannot beat algorithmic competitors using manual spreadsheets and limited native platform tools. You need software that tracks historical data, generates creative variations, and manages bids automatically.
Paid plans start with a trial, allowing you to experience the automation directly on your own ad account. You can view our current setup options at trycrush.ai/pricing.
The numbers in this article come from Crush’s ad library: 1,723,246 unique Facebook ads tracked via the Meta Ad Library, 449,194 of them active at the time of writing. Ad examples
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Rokas is the Founder and CEO of TryCrush.ai, an ex-IBM professional turned entrepreneur focused on building AI-driven growth platforms. With a strong background in ecommerce, performance marketing, media buying, and artificial intelligence, Rokas specializes in creating scalable, data-led systems that drive measurable revenue. His mission is to help modern businesses leverage AI to optimize acquisition, conversions, and long-term profitability.
AI Ad Manager trained by world-class media buyers to generate your creatives and optimize your ads 24/7.
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