A Broccoli Clean Trick: The Meta Ads Library

Broccoli Clean Trick (n.): The opposite of a dirty trick. A straightforward and effective action or process, brought to you by your friends at Broccoli, that demystifies so-called "expert knowledge." Clean Tricks are typically low- or no-cost, often under-utilized, and highly shareable.

Just because you don’t yet know something, but a so-called expert does, doesn’t make it a “trade secret” or proprietary knowledge. Especially when you can (and should) be doing it yourself.

You shouldn’t hire an expert—or consultant, or agency like ours—because you think they know something you don’t. You should contract help because they can do it faster, more efficiently, or at a larger scale than you have the capacity for at a given time*.

Broccoli Clean Trick #1: Use the Meta Ads Library

Imagine you open Instagram and the first thing you see is an eerie AI-generated ad featuring a child in a hospital gown, who seems to be standing on birthday cake flying through space while surrounded by birthday candles the size of pool noodles.

You might think to yourself, “What’s up with these? Are there more? What are they spending? Did I hallucinate that?” Then in an instant, it’s gone. Instead of refreshing the app hoping that you'll get re-targeted the ad again (although, you probably will). You can find the ad in Meta’s Ad Library.

How to see every paid ad being run on Facebook or Instagram:

1. Head to www.facebook.com/ads/library. You don’t need to be logged in to Facebook unless the ads you want to see are considered adult content by Meta.

2. In the “Search Ads” box:

   1. Select your country in the first drop-down box

   2. Select “All ads” in the second.

   3. Type a charity’s name in the search bar, but don’t hit ‘enter’ yet.

3. Before hitting enter, you’ll see suggested advertisers listed. Click on the one you’d like to look at more closely.

4. On the next page you’ll see previews of every live (paid) advertising campaign they are running in Meta.

5. In the upper right-hand area of the page you will see that a default filter of “Active ads” is applied. You can turn that off if you’d like by hitting the ‘X’.

6. In the upper right-hand area you will also see a “Filters” button that can help you narrow down to specific platforms, date ranges, media types, etc.

7. The ad previews show you a sample of the image or video, when the ads started running, the copy, etc. Pick one, and click “See Summary Details” to see the ad variations within the campaign.

8. If you want to share the ad with someone, you can click the three-dot button in the upper right of any ad preview and select “Copy ad link” and share it, which looks like this: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?id=1331479307944451.

To see how much an advertiser spends on an ad:

For ads that are labelled as “Issues, elections or politics” you can see more information, including: estimated audience size, amount spent (a range, not exact), total impressions, audience location (by province), audience age and gender.

To see how much an advertiser has spent on Meta Ads in total:

Again, this only applies to ads labelled as “Issues, elections or politics.”

• When seeing the wall of ad previews, click “See ad details” and you should see on the right-hand side some drop-down options for: About the disclaimer, Ad audience, Ad delivery, and About the Advertiser.

• Click “About the Advertiser” to see how much they have spent in total since creating their account and verifying their organization. You can also see how much they spent last week.

How can this be helpful?

• Do you know which brands or media your supporters enjoy? Look up those accounts to see if you’re inspired.

• Compare your budget against a similar-sized organization (assuming their ads are classified as “issues, elections, or politics”)

• Use the date filter function to see how different organizations have promoted their Giving Tuesday or year-end appeals, etc.

• Explore what ads organizations are running in other countries to see if it sparks any ideas or inspirations for your next test.

Will this Broccoli Clean Trick transform your digital fundraising program overnight? Of course not. But it’s a tool you now have in your kit. Use it wisely, Broccoli Bunch!

*An exception to this might be hiring someone to train you on a new skill so you can do it yourself the next time. Here’s another Broccoli Clean Trick—if you want to learn a small, specific task, you can reach out to consultants or freelancers and ask to hire them for an hour or two to show you. Could they decline? Yes. But it never hurts to ask.