Business Help Center

The Ad Library is our most comprehensive ads transparency surface, providing a view of ads across our apps and services. It helps make advertising transparent by giving people more information about the ads they see.

The Ad Library contains all active ads running across our products. Transparency is a priority for us to help prevent interference in elections, so the Ad Library offers additional information about ads about social issues, elections or politics, including spend, reach and funding entities. These ads are visible whether they're active or inactive and will be stored in the Ad Library for seven years.

In addition to the Ad Library, access to the Ad Library Report and the application programming interface (API) is provided through the homepage. The Ad Library Report provides an aggregated and comprehensive view of ads about social issues, elections or politics in a given country, for a given time period and is available for download. The Ad Library Report is available in all countries that require authorization to run ads about social issues, elections or politics. The Ad Library API allows for deeper analysis of issues, electoral or political ads housed in the Ad Library.

The Ad Library is:

• Available to everyone. Anyone is able to view and search for ads in the Ad Library. However, if ads include certain types of content, like alcohol or gambling, we won't show the ad creative to people who are underage or aren't logged into Facebook. When possible, we rely on people's self-reported age to set these restrictions.
• Searchable. People are able to search for any term, name or Page in the Ad Library. Common searches may include the names of political figures, the names of organizations that pay for ads about social issues, elections or politics, or a specific advertiser or Page. When someone searches in the Ad Library, any ads that include the term searched may appear as well as ads run by Pages that include the term. Ads that aren't about social issues, elections or politics will only be discoverable through visiting a Page in the Ad Library and will not surface in keyword searches.
• Informative: The Ad Library contains multiple trackers, including the Presidential, House and Senate trackers in the United States and the Custom tracker made available globally. The Ad Library Report provides data about advertisers’ spending, geographical spend and more. The API can perform customized keyword searches of ads stored in the Ad Library. The Ad Library homepage offers a status bar that keeps users informed of issues or outages within the Ad Library (such as planned outages, refresh delays, maintenance and more).

Viewing all active ads

All active ads are visible in the Ad Library. You can search for an advertiser to view the active ads running from the advertiser's Page. When viewing a Page’s active ads, ad creative and copy will be displayed. Clicking “See Ad Details” will show additional information, such as from the Page’s “About” section or more information about the lead form for a lead generation ad format. You'll also be able to view the ads from a specific country using the country selector.

You can report ads that you think are misclassified, active ads that you believe should have a disclaimer and don't, or violates other Advertising Policies. You can only report an ad as about social issues, elections or politics in certain countries.

When viewing a Page in the Ad Library you can see additional context about the Page such as when it was created, name changes and admin country locations. Admin country locations are only applicable for pages with high fan count or if they have run an ad about social issues, election or politics in certain countries. Advertisers in the United States have the option to mask the street address and zipcode of their organization's address during the ad disclaimer creation process. If the advertiser chooses to select this option, the full physical address of their organization won’t be shown in the Ad Library searches. This feature is expected to be rolled out in other countries at a future date.

Viewing ads about social issues, elections or politics

You can search ads by Page name or keyword and filter by:

• Country
• Page Name
• Status (Active and/or Inactive)

These ads also include a disclaimer, so you can understand who is paying for the ads. However, ads that were deemed political after they ran won't have a disclaimer.

When a person clicks on “See Ad Details” for an ad, they'll see some of the following information:

• Active or inactive: People can see when an ad started running and whether or not it's currently running.
• Disapproved notice: If an ad in the Ad Library was active but then became disapproved, it'll show as “disapproved” in the Ad Library.
• Impressions: People can see a range for the number of impressions the ad received (example: 1K-5K), not the exact number.
• Amount spent: People can see a range for the amount spent on the ad (example: $1K-$5K), not the exact amount.
• Demographic information (age and gender): People can see the % of people by age and gender who saw an ad.
• Location: People can see information about the location(s) where the ad was viewed.

In addition to seeing context about a Page such as when it was created, name changes or admin country locations, you'll see information from the Ad Library Report such as lifetime and last week spend on ads about social issues, elections or politics.