Meta Ad Library

Free, no account needed, searchable by advertiser or by keyword. It shows the creative, the date each ad started running, and a Library ID for each one.

Why it matters for HVAC

It is the only public window into an advertiser’s actual practice, and it works on the agency pitching you as readily as on your competitors. You can see whether they buy attention themselves, how many variations they run, and how recently anything new went live.

How to read it without getting it wrong

Three traps, and we walked into two of them. The country filter defaults to wherever you are sitting and will silently return nothing if it is wrong. Keyword search matches ad copy and brand substrings, so searching a common surname returns strangers. And the advertiser view requires a Page ID, not the profile ID a website footer links to, and when handed the wrong one it replies "this advertiser isn’t running ads" rather than reporting an error.

The retention rule matters as much as the traps. Commercial ads leave the library when they stop running, so an empty result means nothing is running today. It does not mean nothing ever ran, and writing it the second way would be a false statement about a real company.

A worked example

Our first sweep of nine agencies recorded seven as running no ads. Re-run correctly, the real figure was five, and one company we had recorded as running nothing was running more ads than anyone else on the list. The full account is on the Ad Library check page, because the mistake is more useful than the number.

What it cannot tell you

For commercial ads it shows the Page that ran them and does not name an agency behind a client’s account. So it measures an agency’s own advertising, which is a proxy for how they treat creative volume rather than a measurement of their client work.

Where this is demonstrated

The Tracking and the Conversions API pillar scores every listed agency on what they document here, and gives you the questions that tell you which one you are being sold.