Spying on competitor Facebook ads sounds shady and is completely legal. Meta publishes every active ad in a public library, on purpose, for transparency. The skill is not getting access, it is knowing what to look at. Here is the routine I use.
Start in the Meta Ad Library. Search the brand, set the filter to their country, and open active ads. The first thing to count is volume. A brand with three live ads is being cautious. A brand with two hundred is in heavy testing. That number alone tells you where they sit in their cycle.
Next, look for repetition. The same creative running across several placements is a brand doubling down on a winner. The same message rewritten five ways is a brand still hunting for the angle that lands. Patterns matter more than any single ad.
The thing the Ad Library hides is time. It shows you today and never the trajectory. You cannot see that an ad has been live for six weeks, or that the brand quietly tripled the number of variants last Tuesday. Longevity is the strongest signal a creative is working, and the free tool throws it away.
That is the step where a tracker pays for itself. Dibbin watches the brands you pick and records how long each ad runs and whether spend is ramping, so the proven winners surface on their own. You scan one board with your coffee instead of opening twenty tabs, and you copy the structure of ads that already earned their budget.