Four jobs it does well.
It really only does one thing. It gets ads off the page and onto your disk with the copy still attached. These are the jobs people keep coming back to it for.
Build a swipe file that survives the quarter
Pull every live ad from a brand you admire and keep each version as its own file. Then read the hooks in a spreadsheet rather than squinting at forty screenshots. The file names carry the advertiser, the date and the Library ID, so a folder from March still makes sense in September.
Uses: a file per version, the copy columns, and no cap on how many ads.
See what a competitor is actually running
Filter to active ads in your country, load all the results, take the lot in one pass. The sheet tells you how long each ad has been running and how many others share the same creative. An ad that has run untouched for four months is telling you something. So is a creative that turns up on twenty placements.
Uses: the library filters, the shared-creative count, and the run dates.
Walk into a pitch with their market on a slide
The night before a pitch, download the prospect's ads and their three closest competitors'. You walk in with the creative for your slides and a sheet showing which angles are being tested and which have been left alone for months.
Uses: both libraries, the formatted spreadsheet, one ZIP per advertiser.
Study political and issue ads at volume
Meta publishes political and issue ads behind their own filters, and this reads them like any other search. Non-Latin scripts arrive in the CSV intact, which matters more than people expect. Everything is public data, downloaded logged out, with the source URL on every row.
Uses: the ad category filters, Unicode-safe exports, and the source URL column.
They all end up in this table
Whatever you are chasing, the download puts it in rows you can sort. Run dates tell you what is working. The shared-creative count tells you what the advertiser is backing.
Jobs it won't do
Better you hear it here than find out after paying.
- Lead lists
- It will not dig out emails, phone numbers or social profiles for you. It downloads ads. That is the whole job.
- Spend or performance figures
- Neither library publishes what an ad cost or how it did, apart from the spend ranges Meta puts on political ads. We do not estimate the rest.
- Scheduled monitoring
- Nothing of ours sits on a server watching an advertiser for you. You run a search when you want one. With the browser closed, nothing happens at all.
- Anything behind a login
- It reads the public libraries while logged out. No account access, and no attempt to work around a security check.
See it on your own searches
Ten days with everything unlocked, and we do not ask for a card. Say which browser you use and we will send a build and a key.