Meta Ad Library
The Meta Ad Library is the public archive of every active and recently active ad on Facebook and Instagram, run by Meta since 2018 for transparency. It exposes the creative, the page running it, the run dates, and for political ads the spend bands and audience targeting. Sentia pulls from the Ad Library every day in 2026 to fuse paid creative against organic posts on the same competitor view, with detection latency typically under 48 hours from first creative.
What it is
The Meta Ad Library is a searchable, public-by-policy archive of ads served on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network. It exposes ad creative, the running page, start and end dates, the platforms the ad served on, and a stable ad-archive identifier. Political and issue ads also expose spend ranges, impression ranges, and demographic targeting summaries.
Access is via the public web UI, the Ad Library Report, or the Ad Library API. The API is gated by a Meta-verified identity check on the developer account.
Why it matters
The Ad Library is the only credible public source for what a competitor is currently running on Meta surfaces. It lets a marketing team see the actual creative, watch how a campaign evolves over its run, and detect a launch within hours.
The catch is gating: API access needs a Meta-verified user token, not a system-user token. That requirement trips a lot of automation pipelines on the first day.
How Sentia uses it
Sentia ingests the Ad Library daily through a verified personal token. Each Meta ad is matched back to the brand, normalized into a unified ad record, and joined to organic posts on the same calibrated dashboard. The detection cron runs at 09:00 UTC and typically surfaces a competitor's new creative within 48 hours of the first impression.
Related concepts
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