Before building a product for a market, you can see exactly who is already paying to reach it. The Meta Ad Library is a public, free, searchable archive of every advert currently running on Facebook and Instagram, in every country, with the creative attached. Most founders have never opened it. It is the cheapest competitive research available and it takes an afternoon.
This article is the method, and the worked example is our own. In September 2026 we swept the expense-tracker and receipt-scanner category across six countries before deciding where to push Receiply. The full findings are below, including the countries where nobody is advertising at all.
What the Meta Ad Library actually shows you
Search a company name or a keyword, pick a country, and you get every advert that company is running right now, with the video or image, the text, and how long it has been live. Nothing is inferred and nothing is estimated. It is what the advertiser chose to say, filtered by where they chose to say it.
Three things follow from that, and they are what make it worth an afternoon:
- Adverts that have run a long time are working. Nobody pays to keep a losing creative live. Duration is the closest thing to a free performance signal you will get.
- Volume of creatives shows commitment. A company running sixteen variants is testing seriously. A company running one is dabbling.
- Absence is information. An empty category in a country is either a market nobody wants, or one nobody has reached yet. Which of those it is becomes the interesting question.
The method, in six steps
- List the competitors you already know, then search the category keyword to find the ones you do not. The second list is usually longer.
- Run each name in every country you might sell to, one at a time. The library is country-filtered, and the differences between countries are the whole point.
- Record, for each advertiser: number of active creatives, length of each, how long they have run, and the format.
- Watch the first five seconds of the top creatives. The hook is the most tested part of any advert and the most transferable thing you will learn.
- Note who is not an app. In most categories, part of the demand is being absorbed by something that is not software at all.
- Write down the angles nobody is using. That list is worth more than the competitor summary.
What we found: expense trackers, six countries, September 2026
A snapshot of active video adverts on the dates we looked. Advertisers change constantly; treat this as a method demonstration, not a live scoreboard.
Only one country was genuinely contested
In the United States, five established advertisers were running simultaneously. One receipt-scanning app was running sixteen or more creatives between eighteen and fifty-seven seconds, including copies published from individual creator pages rather than the brand page. Another well-known money app ran nine, from ten seconds to a full minute. A third ran a receipt-focused line of four alongside a completely separate campaign with more than eighty user-generated creatives aimed at contractors.
That is what a fought-over market looks like: multiple advertisers, deep creative libraries, and separate campaigns for separate audiences.
Three English-speaking markets had no app advertising at all
In Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, we found no established expense app advertising. The demand was visible, but it was being absorbed by people selling budget spreadsheets — one Australian seller alone was running fifteen creatives — plus a handful of very new apps testing eight to eighteen second hooks.
This was the single most useful finding of the sweep. People in those countries clearly want the problem solved; they are being sold a spreadsheet because nothing else is reaching them.
Continental Europe split in two
France had zero expense apps advertising: only spreadsheet sellers, a children’s card product, a neobank, and business accounting tools. The Netherlands was the opposite, with three new apps launching campaigns inside a single month. Two neighbouring markets, opposite conclusions, and you would not guess which was which from outside.
What the winning creative looked like
The strongest advert we found ran twenty-seven seconds and was structured like this:
- 0 to 12 seconds: a real tradesperson, filmed on a phone, mid-job, talking to camera. No app on screen at all for the first twelve seconds.
- 12 to 16 seconds: the app icon, then a screen recording of a receipt being scanned.
- 16 to 22 seconds: a list of receipts scrolling, showing real merchant names.
- 22 to 24 seconds: the export, landing on a real tax form.
- 24 to 27 seconds: back to the person, with a download prompt.
Nearly half the advert runs before the product appears. The hook is a person with the problem, not a feature. The same footage was also running dubbed into a second language, which is a cheap way to double a creative library.
Three formats recurred everywhere
- User-generated video plus a screen recording, twenty to forty seconds, ending on a concrete payoff.
- Creator-whitelisted adverts — identical copy published from several personal accounts rather than the brand page. Multiple advertisers were doing this, which tells you it works.
- Six to eleven second hook-only clips, used by the newest and smallest advertisers.
How to turn the findings into a decision
The sweep changes three decisions, and they are the same three in any category.
Which market to enter first. Uncontested and English-speaking beats large and crowded when you have no budget. We chose Australia, Canada and the UK ahead of the United States on exactly that reasoning, despite the US being far bigger.
What to say. The angles nobody was using were more valuable than the ones everybody was. Where the incumbent solution is a spreadsheet, the pitch writes itself. Where every competitor asks for a bank connection, not asking for one is a position rather than a feature.
What to build first. If the winning adverts in your category all end on the same payoff, that payoff needs to work in your product before you spend anything on advertising.
The limits of this research
Be honest about what it cannot tell you. The library shows spend on Meta only — a competitor might be running entirely on TikTok, search or partnerships and appear absent. It shows no budgets, no performance and no results. Ad duration is a proxy for success, not proof of it. And it is a snapshot: everything above could change next month.
It also tells you nothing about whether the market is profitable, only whether it is contested. Those are different questions.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Meta Ad Library free?
Yes, and it needs no account. It exists because of political-advertising transparency rules, and commercial adverts are included.
How long does a sweep take?
An afternoon for one category across five or six countries, if you record as you go. Repeating it quarterly takes an hour.
Can I do the same for TikTok or Google?
TikTok’s Creative Center and Google’s Ads Transparency Center serve a similar purpose, though access and coverage vary. When we ran this sweep the TikTok tool was unavailable to us, which is worth planning around rather than being surprised by.
What if nobody is advertising in my category?
Investigate before celebrating. Sometimes it means an unreached market. Sometimes it means the economics do not work and everyone tried already. The way to tell them apart is to look at what people are buying instead.
Where this fits
Research like this is worth doing before a build, not after. If you are weighing whether to build something bespoke at all, our guides to custom software versus off-the-shelf and what custom software costs in the UK cover the next two questions, and the software development brief template covers what to write down before approaching anyone.
We also run this kind of structured research with agents rather than by hand, which is the same architecture described in how we automated this blog. If you want that pointed at your market, tell us the category.