If you run ads from Tunisia, Morocco, the Gulf, or most of the world, the Meta Ad Library shows you a competitor's creative, the date it started, the platforms it runs on — and nothing about the money. No spend, no reach, no impressions.

In the European Union it is different. Under the Digital Services Act, every ad shown to EU users publishes a reach range and the audience it was delivered to. That is why so many "spy tools" look impressive on a French brand and go quiet on a Tunisian one: their numbers came from the DSA fields, and where those fields do not exist, the tools either go blank or start guessing.

This post is about the guessing. There are four signals that survive without a spend column, and one way to combine them that does not invent a number.

What the Ad Library shows you outside the EU

Open any advertiser page from a non-EU account and you get, per ad:

  • whether it is active or inactive, and the start date;
  • the platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, Messenger);
  • the creative itself — every image or video variation attached to the same ad;
  • the landing page behind the call to action;
  • the page's other ads, which is the part most people skip.

You do not get spend, impressions, reach, clicks, or anything about results. Anyone showing you "estimated revenue" for a Tunisian shop derived from the Ad Library alone is showing you a model, not a measurement.

The four signals that survive without spend

1. Longevity. A brand keeps paying for an ad only while it pays back. An ad active for 30 days is a stronger statement than an ad launched yesterday, whatever the creative looks like. Sort by days active before you look at anything else.

2. Family size. Count how many variations sit inside one concept — same hook, same offer, five different cuts or crops. A brand does not produce five versions of an idea that lost. Family size is the closest public proxy for "they are scaling this".

3. Relaunches. The same creative, paused, then active again with a new start date. That is a media buyer bringing back a proven asset, often for a seasonal push. It is a stronger signal than a first launch.

4. Page rhythm. How many ads the page runs in total, and what share of them is new this week. A page that launches twenty ads and keeps three is testing; a page that keeps fifteen of twenty has found its angle and is protecting it.

Add the landing page as a fifth read: a dedicated page for the offer is an investment; a generic product page is not.

One honest read, not a fake number

The mistake is to turn those signals into dollars. The better move is to turn them into a rank.

Score each ad on longevity, family size and recency, rank the competitor's ads by that score, and call the top of the list what it is: most advertised. Not "best selling". Not "top ROAS". You do not know that, and a label that pretends you do will steer a real budget the wrong way.

The distinction matters when you brief a creative. "This is their most-advertised concept for six weeks" is a hypothesis you can test. "This made them $40k" is a story you cannot check.

A twenty-minute weekly routine

  1. Pick five competitors — two bigger than you, two your size, one from another market selling the same category.
  2. For each, list the ads active for more than 14 days.
  3. Group them into families. Write the hook and the offer of each family in one line.
  4. Open the landing page of the biggest family. Note what the page promises that the ad does not.
  5. Write one hypothesis per family for your own account: what is the angle, who is it for, what would our version of it be.

Five competitors, twenty minutes, three to five hypotheses. That is a week of creative direction that came from evidence rather than from a feed.

How Creativity does it

Inspo is that routine, run every day over a shared catalog. At the time of writing the catalog holds 2,163 competitor ads: 1,280 from the US library and 883 from the EU library, where the DSA fields exist and are shown as what they are — EU estimates, labelled as estimates.

For everything else, Inspo shows longevity, family size and recency, and ranks by them. It never prints revenue or ROAS for an ad it cannot see the results of. The free tier shows the first cards clear and the long tail blurred, so you can check the read on your own competitors before paying for anything.

What not to do

  • Do not buy "estimated ROAS" for a non-EU brand. Ask the vendor where the number comes from. If the answer is a model over the Ad Library, it is a guess with a decimal point.
  • Do not copy the creative. Copy the structure — the hook type, the offer shape, the proof used. The creative belongs to them; the pattern belongs to the market.
  • Do not confuse many ads with winning ads. Twenty launches in one day is a testing batch, not twenty winners. Wait for longevity.

The Ad Library outside the EU is quieter than people think — and louder than the tools admit, once you stop looking for a spend column that is not there.