Have you ever thought that spy services might not be needed at all? No, it’s not because they’re expensive or don’t work well, or because of another rumor saying “affiliate marketing is about to die”. Just as it sometimes happens, their free counterpart came across. And here it is, the Facebook Ads Library https://www.facebook.com/ads/library. The assortment of the library will allow you to find the necessary creatives as good as those that you would find in the most expensive spy service.

Let’s talk in detail about what the Facebook Ad Library is and how to properly browse it.

Facebook Ad Library Benefits

–   It’s an absolutely free tool

–   It can see text in pictures, on videos, and can look for key phrases in them

–   the Facebook Ad Library provides information directly from Facebook, without an intermediary

–   Facebook ad creatives are saved to the library instantly, right after passing moderation on Facebook Ads. For comparison, this process takes several days in any spying service.

What else should you know about working with the Facebook Ad Library?

Many things. Let’s talk about the most important point of our article.

Keyword Search

–   Go here https://www.facebook.com/ads/library

–   Choose a geo

–   Set “All ads” as your type of advertising

–   Insert search keyword

–   Set the necessary filters, if your situation requires it.

View all advertisements

By default, the Facebook Ad Library will not allow you to view the entire creative database when you don’t have a keyword. However, if you have been an affiliate for more than a year, you’re immune to difficulties, and your neural connections have been rebuilt so that you will soon be able to bypass karma itself. Therefore, we can fix this annoying omission like this:

–   Open the library and set the GEO and types of ads you need

–   Put  an “invisible space” in the search bar. Be sure to take this magical thing from us – copy “⠀“ between the quotes, because the standard space on our keyboard will not work!

After that, you will see some creatives available to you, but these creatives will be for all geos.

The desired result will allow you to see the following settings:

–   Click on Filters

–   Next, set the date range – the period for which you want to view creatives. You don’t need to set the entire period or a too wide period of time since the library will work much slower.

–   Choose a language. For example, our GEO is the Philippines and therefore we have Tagalog.

And here is our final output according to the filters:

What if the required language isn’t available?

Unfortunately, the Facebook Ad Library doesn’t include all currently existing languages, and therefore, if the language is unknown, it will not work to filter creatives in this way. So how do you search then?

Let’s look at the way around the language barrier on the example of Kazakhstan.

Option 1

In the CIS location, we can set the Russian language, since it is in the list of available ones:

Overall result comes out good:

Option 2

Not every geo can find an alternative language that allows you to filter out unnecessary creatives. Therefore, if our language wasn’t added to the library and there is no alternative option (as indicated in the example with the Russian language), then you can simply type one letter of the language of your target geo – this will make it possible to find creatives in this language.

–   So, in the search box, enter one letter of the Kazakh alphabet. For example, we chose the letter “қ” and so now we will see all creatives that have their copies in the Kazakh language and that contain its letter “қ”.

However, the result of the search can be even better. To do this, you need to take the more popular Cyrillic letter “A” (as it is in both Russian and Kazakh languages and, therefore, markets). You can just type it to the search string, as the Kazakh language that wasn’t available before, will be listed in the filter:

And now a small but very powerful trick:

–   Look at the address bar in the browser, find the key q=%E2%A0%80а and remove the last letter “a” from it

–   As a result, the FB advertising library produces 11,000 results. And what’s very important here is that the set filters will not be reset:

Working with a link

When you get how the library works, feel free to use one link, substituting the necessary parameters.

–   Work with this link:

https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=all&country=KZ&q=%E2%A0%80&start_date%5Bmin%5D=2022-12-01&start_date%5Bmax%5D=&search_type=keyword_unordered&media_type=all&content_languages%5B0%5D=kk

–   Change the geo, date, language and follow the link you form in this way.

Search by domain

Working with the approaches that we described above, you can get impressive results if you use a domain as a keyword for search.

Here are Facebook advertising creatives in the gambling niche in the Kazakh geo and using the play.google.com domain as an example:

The “.TK” domain belongs to the Kazakh geo:

Monitoring details and downloading creatives

–   When you find a quality creative, click on “See ad details”

–   Open the page with detailed information on the creative

–   To download a video creative, first of all play it, and then right-click to go to the context menu and save the creative using “Save Video As”.

When you click on “See ad details”, you will see more of this fan page’s creatives:

We can also see the fan page itself.

–   Click on “About”

–   “Go to Page”

We took some comments on this topic from an experienced affiliate:

Evgeny Toporkov, founder of ZeonAds agency, affiliate since 2016

I agree with the statement from the beginning of the article that spying services may become unnecessary.

The ad library and Facebook’s algorithms have advanced so much that they can already read the text from the creative itself, which makes it much easier to work with the search for references.

Right now, I work with spying services and the library together, but I think that soon, it’ll be possible to completely abandon this joint approach and just use the library alone.

Conclusion

It’s obvious that not all the most valuable information is hidden far away from you and that you don’t always have to pay for it.

A living example is the Facebook Ad Library. Here, Facebook is literally providing you with advertising creatives completely free of charge and gives you tens of thousands of these creatives for each of your requests. Of course, such a “built-in” method can’t be that perfect. But we know that any system has its gaps and who, if not affiliates, should look for and find these gaps. The Facebook Ad Library, of course, has its weak points, which you can easily see and learn how to find what you need regardless of them.

In general, if you know what, where, and how to do it, then the Facebook Ad Library will more than replace those paid spying services.