How to see competitors' Facebook ads from the UK, and what to log each week

To see a competitor's Facebook and Instagram ads, search their brand or Page name in the Meta Ad Library, which is free and needs no login. For ads delivered to the UK, Meta also records the ages, genders and locations the advertiser chose, plus a breakdown of who the ad reached. That gives a UK shop more detail on a rival's targeting than most guides mention.

What you cannot see is spend. This guide covers finding the ads, reading the UK detail, checking Google as well, and a fifteen-minute weekly log that turns all of it into decisions for a small studio or shop.

How to see competitors' Facebook ads in the Meta Ad Library

The steps below follow Metricool's January 2026 walkthrough of the library:

1. Open the Meta Ad Library in your browser. You do not need to log in.
2. Choose a country, in this case the United Kingdom, and an ad category, usually All ads.
3. Search for the competitor's brand name, or for a product or style keyword. Results are grouped by Page.
4. Click into individual ads to see the images or video, primary text and headlines, calls to action, start dates and variations, and the platforms where each ad appears.
5. Filter by country or platform to narrow the list.

Let your own clients pick the competitors. Ask new clients which other studios or shops they looked at before they chose you, and keep a tally for a month. The three or four names that come up most are the ones worth watching, even if they are not the biggest in your town.

Search more than one name. A studio might advertise under its trading name, a founder's artist account and a separate shop Page for aftercare or jewellery.

What the library records for ads delivered to the UK

Meta publishes extra detail for ads shown in the UK and EU. Its Ad Library API documentation lists the age ranges, genders and locations selected for targeting in the UK and EU. It also lists a demographic breakdown of the UK and EU accounts each ad reached (Meta for Developers, Archived Ad reference). The same documentation marks spend and impressions as available only for ads about social issues, elections or politics.

So for an ordinary commercial competitor you can learn who they aimed at and who they reached, but not how much they paid. That still answers useful questions. A rival studio targeting 18 to 24 year olds within a few miles of a university is chasing a different client from one targeting 35 to 54 across the county, even if their creative looks alike.

Check their Google ads as well

For search ads, Google runs the Ads Transparency Center, which Google describes as a searchable hub of all ads served from verified advertisers. When it launched, Google said you can see which ads were shown in a certain region, the last date an ad ran, and the format of the ad (Google, March 2023). Set the region to the United Kingdom so the results match the ads your customers saw.

A competitor with plenty of Google ads and nothing live on Meta is probably betting that their clients search before they scroll. That is worth knowing before you split your own budget.

A fifteen-minute weekly competitor log

Looking at competitor ads once gives you a mood board. Looking every week, at the same Pages, and writing down the same few things, shows you their calendar. Pick three to five competitors and record these each Monday:

• New ads since last week, and any that stopped.
• Start dates of the ads still running. An ad that has run for many weeks is one the advertiser keeps paying for, which is a fair sign it works for them.
• The offer: a percentage off, a free gift, a flash day, a guest artist, a new collection, or no offer at all.
• Where the ad sends people: a booking page, a product page, a DM, or a landing page for one design.
• Targeting and reach, where the library shows it for UK delivery.

A log entry can be one line per competitor. For example: "Studio A, 4 ads live, 1 new (flash day, 25 October), longest running 9 weeks (healed blackwork carousel), sends to booking page, targeting ages 25 to 44 in Leeds." Written that way, a month of entries can be read in a minute.

After six to eight weeks, patterns show. You might find that one shop runs 20% off on the last weekend of every month, that another only advertises when it has a guest artist booked, or that a body-jewellery seller pushes titanium whenever a rival pushes steel. You can plan around a pattern you can see, instead of reacting to each ad as it appears.

What to do with what you find

Use the log to make decisions about your own marketing, and keep your creative your own. Copying a competitor's images or wording invites a dispute and makes you look like them.

• If a rival discounts at the same point every month, do not match the discount by reflex. Run your own promotion a week earlier, or promote something they do not sell.
• If their longest-running ads all show healed work, test healed photos in your own ads against fresh ones.
• If their UK targeting skews to one age band or one town, look at whether the band they ignore is one you serve well.
• If a competitor goes quiet on Meta and appears on Google, check your own Google Business Profile and search ads before they pick up your searches.

Then judge every change against your own numbers. A competitor's ad tells you what they are trying. Only your bookings, orders and spend tell you whether your response worked.

Keep competitors next to your own figures

The weekly log is easier to keep when it sits beside your own results. BriefSieve has a Competitors section for keeping an eye on what competitors are posting and promoting, alongside Ads, Social, Email, Sales and five other sections in one dashboard. Each morning its AI Guru writes a plain-English brief of what changed. Code computes the figures and the Guru narrates them, so it never invents a number.

BriefSieve was built for tattoo and body-jewellery operators and is priced in pounds from £29 a month excluding VAT. The app runs at mypa.services under the name VirtualPA. Start the 15-day BriefSieve trial, with two integrations and no card, and read your competitors and your own numbers in the same morning brief. For the order to read the rest of the dashboard in, see our marketing dashboard for small business guide.