Last Updated on October 30, 2023 by Content Team

Facebook advertising can be very powerful if you know how to do it well. Facebook ad spy tools are a must for anyone looking to take their ads to the next level to maximize their return on ad spend.  All the top CPA affiliate marketers and E-commerce guys use advanced spy tools to copy ads and full campaigns.

What are AD Spy Tools?
Ad spy tools are mostly intelligence programs which enable you to know your competitors’ ad strategy and deliver you meaningful information which in turn can help you to create your ad for an effective and profitable campaign.

How do Facebook AD Spy tools work?
Simply put, the websites scrape massive amounts of data of successful, creative and unique ad campaigns from different companies and let you check those by filtering different keywords. Some spy tools also help you in creating your own ad and prepare a report to show its probable effectiveness. You can also schedule campaigns and check their impact from different features of these programs. Overall, Facebook AD spy tools take the responsibility of providing you with a tension-free and affluent online business.

Note: Facebook hates people scraping their ads and makes it difficult as possible. If you research FB spy tools, 80% of the websites/tools no longer exist as they have been blocked from scraping the data.

Facebook Ad Ideas

Sites that are not banned are those which display ads that are not currently live.  These sites give you lots of ideas for yoru ad copy and can be searched by niche.

PowerAdspy – Facebook Ad Spt Software

Considered as one of the best Facebook AD spy tools out there, PowerAdspy is a fantastic program that lets you spy on your competitors’ marketing tactics and copy them or get inspired by them to use in your own business. The website has over 1000s of people from all over the world whose responsibility is to go through millions of ads and submit the most successful ones for your benefit. PowerAdspy has a strong database with 5,000,000+ ads, 2,000,000+ advertisers and 1,000,000+ monthly updates. You can draw inspiration from these ads based on your business niche and create a unique and more attractive ad to stay ahead of your competitors.

In PowerAdspy, you can search relevant ads without wasting too much time on ads you do not need. It allows you to search by age, gender, interests, keyword, or by the landing page happenings. You can also check out your competitors’ campaigns and track their ads, angles, creatives etc. which will help you to create your ad quickly and effectively.

Pricing (Per Month):
• Basic $49
• Standard $99
• Premium $249

BigSpy Facebook Ad Spy Tool

Best Ad spy tool for agencies

Bigspy is an all round spy tool for monitoring ads on the biggest platforms in the world: Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, Instgram etc.

Bigspy goes down the freemium route with a free plan for small users, you get 5 queries per day. Anyone serious about Facebook advertising will be looking at the Pro account with 250 searches per day along with 250 ads tracked and 250 ad downloads. The Elite version is best for agencies with multiple users and unlimited data.

Bigspy’s dashboard is super-clean and intuitive with a ton of filtering options; Country, CTA type, creative type, device etc.

I did a search for ‘dog beds’ targeting USA only from the last 12 months and got 305 ads.

Once you have have refined your ad list, you can filter by the length of time they have been running – its unlikely people are going to be running ads for 170 days if they are not profitable.  Bigspy also has their own measure of ad quality with their ‘Heat’ metric.

View Bigspy Pricing 

Adfox

AdFox is a Russian-based Facebook advertising intelligence software for providing insight into the competitors’ campaigns. It has a database-oriented filter platform which allows the user to view the exact ad based on his preferred niche. You can also search for an ad you liked before by using the advertiser’s landing domain in the search box.

Along with providing insights on campaigns created by other companies, it helps you to choose your own angle, target audience and keep a track of its effectiveness. It also lets you view ad engagement level, clicking and buying rate etc. so that you can improve it later.
Additionally, Adfox lets you monitor specific ads and save those for future reference. It also helps to reduce the user’s CPC and improves CTR by providing helpful statistics.

Pricing (Per Month):
• No fixed amount.
• Payments can be chosen on three levels of settings.

AdGenius

AdGenius is a cloud-based advanced spy tool for Facebook ads which currently works on advert data from different business companies in UK (United Kingdom) and USA (United States of America). This spy tool is designed for showing the users which advertisements are being used by other companies under the same niche market.

However, most of the ads displayed on the website are sponsored ads but usually not displayed on the advertiser’s own Facebook page. The website also has a first-hand experience of specializing in mobile-based ads. It consists of about 80% of their total ads and is aligned with Facebook’s usage statistics. Moreover, about 85% of their displayed ads are mainly newsfeed ads which are displayed on desktop and tablet only.

The website follows an advanced keyword-based search system which allows you to find out the desired and relevant ads based on media type, link type, website type etc. You can also view them based on most recent, most viewed, most liked, most clicked, most searched ads etc. Another facility that the website offers is their full ad exposure program which allows you to see everything in an ad from ad description, ad headline, call to action button, last seen option to number of likes, comments and shares in such a way that you gain meaningful and helpful insights for creating your own.
Pricing (Per Month):
• All features £149 – £199

AdPlexity

[Update Sept 2019: Adplexity have stopped supplying this tool, think Facebook were getting pissed off.  They may have just paused the service until they can start scraping ads again]

AdPlexity is another amazing intelligence tool to step up your ad game in this competitive marketing sector. Even though the website is relatively new, it has already earned a favorite spot in many users’ list all around the world. AdPlexity draws attention the most for its stunning and vibrant layout created for beginner and expert users. Its modern design has all the essential guidelines needed to find your way around your competitors’ ad strategy and master the art of online marketing by creating your own ad.

AdPlexity has a huge database, with campaigns from 75+ countries including all the major ones. It allows you to view campaigns running on different devices as popup traffic sources and grants you real-time insights. You can also download other landing pages with images, CSS, JavaScript etc. directly from AdPlexity.

The software also has an advanced filter system where you can search not only by keywords but also by publisher, adviser, affiliate network etc. Moreover, you can find hundreds of ads promoting offers from different affiliate networks.
Pricing (Per Month):
• $199 all inclusive.

Macaw Ad Spy Tool

This is one of the latest Facebook ad spy tools on the market.  Macaw reached out and gave me access for 10 days to see what the platform is like.

Macaw lets you filter your search by ad formats, apps/sites, dates and targeting – you can search for ads specifically targeting women with iphones for examples.

Macaw was built for the Russian market and gives you the ability to check ads on myTarget, which is a huge source of ads in Russia.

Search example: ‘writing course’ targeting USA only

I filtered the results to the last 365 days and got 45 creatives to look through.

Hovering over the ad gives you the full ad text which you can download as an archive. Macaw also shows you all the countries the ad is targeting and the landing page link so you can examine the user flow.

Macaw has another section called ‘applications’,  which shows you all the ads by the biggest apps in the world. Here’s an example of some of Tiktok’s data with 81K+ Ads in the Macaw database.

You can also see how Tiktok have been heavily targeting Mexico and Brazil to expand their reach.

Overall, Macaw looks like a great tool if you are heavily into Facebook ads.

View Macaw Prices

Social Ads Tool

Social Ads tool is a premium service for managing and optimizing Facebook ads. It is known for its strong security and trustworthy data as the website itself is a Facebook marketing Partner. Social Ads tool isn’t officially a spy tool, but you can still use it for the same purpose as it lets you modify your own ads based on the other competitors’ spending behavior.

You can select your target audience and switch on the website’s optimization engine and get access to multivariate testing rules prepared by the website’s marketing experts. Data analysis is simple and meaningful insights can be gained quickly even from a large amount of data. For international users, the website features multiple languages for convenient working. English, Spanish, Turkish, Portuguese, Russian and Italian are the currently available languages on the platform.

Social Ads Tools is a very fast software that can generate 4800+ different ads in less than a minute. The website also offers a slick ad-generation tool which allows the user to check out and prepare an easy campaign. If you do not want to spend every day on optimizing and promoting your ads, Social Ads Tools comes in handy as the program helps you do the both if you take their services.
Pricing (Per Month):
• No fixed amount.
• Price varies depending on the user’s needs.

If you do not want to use paid tools and only looking for some quick inspiration, you can try these free tools:

Facebook Ad Examples for Ideas

Here’s a couple of places to find facebook ad inspiration

AdEspresso Facebook Examples

As you can already assume from the name of this popular Facebook AD tool, it focuses on helping you to optimize your ads as easily as making an espresso coffee. Therefore, the visually pleasing website lets you gain the highest amount of benefit just from following the well-informed dashboard. Basically, it is aimed towards people who are new to using spy tools and features a Canva integration web design tool that works excellently for creating and editing images for ads.

In AdEspresso, you do not only gain access to millions of ads designed by your competitors or other successful business companies but also create variants of your designed ads. The website provides you with an advanced metric data result of your campaign which helps you to track and improve your projects.

Swiped

Swiped is a great site for understanding why some Facebook ads work. Along with a lot of facebook ad swipes they also have details on why the ads work.

How to Manually Spy on Competitor’s Facebook Ads

If you don’t want to pay for any expensive Facebook ad spy tools, you can do all your ad spying manually.  Here are a few simple steps.

1. Visit all your competitor’s websites, especially if you know they are doing Facebook retargeting

2. Like every major competitor’s Facebook page and engage with their posts and ads

You will now start seeing all their targeted ads on Facebook in your FB stream. You know need to use a screenshot tool like Awesome Screenshots to grab a pic of the ad. You can also add some notes on why you like certain ads or why you think they work.

3. Upload all your facebook ad swipes to a platform like Trello or use Pinterest and make the board private.

To get more examples, go to your Facebook Ad preferences and select the category you are researching. You can now view more examples of ads people have been using.

Further Facebook Advertising Resources/Hacks

Facebook As Hacks Group – by Cat Howell

Facebook Ad Buyers Group – by Tim Burd

Facebook Ad Library Group

Gareth James

Gareth James has been in internet marketing since 2001. Gareth currently runs a portfolio of websites and works with a handful of clients.