Ad Spy Series (Part 1): A Systematic Approach to Tracking Competitor Ads

One of the most valuable use cases for Ad Spy tools is tracking what your competitors are running. For anyone serious about paid advertising, understanding market trends is a fundamental competitive edge. In this post, I'll use dropshipping as an example to walk through how to use Ad Spy effectively for product research.

Ads Follow Seasonal Patterns

Brand advertising tends to follow predictable seasonal cycles — you'll see a surge in cold-weather apparel ads during winter, and sports or outdoor gear dominating in summer. By identifying which categories are seeing the highest ad volume during a given period, you can get a rough signal of what's trending and potentially worth selling.

That said, raw ad volume isn't the whole picture. The data is inherently relative: a category that looks dominant within a limited sample might tell a different story once you broaden your research scope. Think of ad volume as one data point in a larger framework, not a standalone verdict.

Inferring Ad Performance Through Logic

A more meaningful signal is ad performance — but since Facebook Ad Library doesn't expose performance metrics for most ads (with the exception of EU and UK ads, which we'll cover in a future post), we need to reason from indirect evidence.

Here's a practical approach: spy on 20 brands within the same niche simultaneously. If the majority of them have increased their ad spend over the past week, that's a potential signal of a trending opportunity. More tellingly, if several of those accounts eventually narrow down to just 1–2 ads running consistently over a long period, that's a strong indicator that those creatives are performing — and that this niche direction is worth exploring further.

How dropshippers actually analyze and draw inspiration from winning ads using Ad Spy? We'll break that down in the next post.