LinkedIn Ad Library: how to see competitor ads

The LinkedIn Ad Library is LinkedIn's public archive of ads, and it is the most direct way to see competitor ads on LinkedIn. Go to linkedin.com/ad-library, search by company name, keyword, country or date range, and each result shows the ad, its format, the advertiser and who paid for it. Ads stay listed for a year after their last impression. Ads targeted to the EU also show estimated impressions, targeting and run dates, but no ad shows spend, clicks or leads.

It is easy to open it, scroll a wall of single-image ads and close the tab. The better use is slower. Pick one competitor, find the ads it has paid to keep running for months, and read what they promise, who they target and where they send the click.

LinkedIn Ad Library: what it is and where to find it

The Ad Library is a searchable database of ads that ran on LinkedIn after June 1, 2023, at linkedin.com/ad-library. According to LinkedIn's Ad Library help page, each ad stays in it for one year after its last impression. In practice you are looking at the last 12 months of a company's LinkedIn advertising, including whatever is live today.

Some people search for it as the "LinkedIn ads library". It is the same tool.

You can also reach it from a company's LinkedIn Page. Pages used to have an Ads filter that showed six months of a company's Sponsored Content. LinkedIn began removing that filter in May 2024 and now links each Page to its ads in the Ad Library instead, so older advice about "the Ads tab" is out of date.

How to see competitor ads on LinkedIn

Searching takes about a minute per competitor once you know which fields matter.

1. Open the Ad Library.
2. Enter the competitor's name, as it appears on its LinkedIn Page, in the company or advertiser search. A common name pulls in unrelated companies, so check the advertiser on each result.
3. To survey a topic instead of one company, search a keyword such as your product category or a phrase from your own homepage. This turns up advertisers you did not know you were competing with.
4. Pick a country where the competitor sells. If it sells in Europe, start with an EU country, because those ads carry extra data.
5. Set a date range, such as the last three months, to separate current campaigns from old ones.
6. Open the ads that interest you. Each one has its own page in the library that you can save or send to a colleague.

The search also takes a payer name. That helps when a parent company pays for several brands.

What each ad record shows

Every ad in the library lists five things.

• A preview of the ad as members saw it
• The ad format
• The advertiser name
• The payer name
• Whether the ad is restricted

Restricted ads hide the preview, the advertiser and the payer, which LinkedIn says it does to comply with the law. They still appear in results, but you cannot tell whose they are, so skip them.

The payer name is worth a glance. When it differs from the advertiser, it usually means an agency or a parent company is paying for the ads.

Extra detail for ads targeted to the EU

Ads targeted to the European Union also show the dates they ran, their impressions and their targeting. LinkedIn adds these to comply with the law, and its page on Ad Library targeting and impressions explains each field.

Impressions. You get an estimate of total impressions and a split by country, rounded to the nearest percent, with anything under 1% shown as "<1%". LinkedIn notes that some impressions land outside the targeted countries, for example when members travel or have an old location on their profile. A sliver of impressions in an odd country is noise.

Targeting. You see the main targeting the advertiser chose and whether each one included or excluded people. The types include job, company, education, location, language, age, gender, member interests and traits, matched audiences, predictive audiences and audience expansion.

Run dates. The days the ad ran, which is the quickest way to spot ads a competitor has kept alive for months.

For a B2B marketer this is the best data in the library. Job and company targeting tell you which buyers a competitor is chasing. A matched audience means retargeting or an uploaded list of contacts or target accounts, so that ad is aimed at people the competitor has already picked out. The search form also has a "More" button that filters EU-targeted ads by impression range and by targeting.

What the Ad Library does not show

The library tells you what ran, not how it performed. It leaves out:

• Spend, clicks, leads and cost per lead. Impressions are the only delivery number, and only on EU-targeted ads.
• Targeting for ads that were not targeted to the EU.
• Ads whose last impression was more than a year ago.
• The owner and creative of restricted ads.
• Ads on other networks. For Facebook and Instagram, the Meta Ad Library works in a similar way. For search ads, you can see the Google ads a competitor runs from its domain.

That makes run length your best stand-in for results. A company rarely keeps paying for a LinkedIn ad for six months unless it brings in leads at a cost it accepts. The other explanation is that nobody is watching the account. You can tell the two apart by whether the same company keeps launching new ads. An advertiser that ships fresh variations every few weeks is managing the account, so its old ads have survived on merit.

How to analyze LinkedIn competitor ads

Put one competitor's ads in a spreadsheet, one row per ad, with the format, headline, offer, call to action, landing page, run dates and impressions where you have them. Then read the sheet three ways.

The messages and offers they keep running

Sort by how long each ad ran and read the top five. Write down the problem each one names and the offer it makes, such as a demo, a trial, a template or a benchmark report. If the same offer shows up in old and new ads with different wording, the competitor is still testing copy around an offer that already works. Respond to the offer. The exact headline matters much less.

Run dates come with EU-targeted ads. For a competitor that only advertises outside the EU, repeat the same search every few weeks and note which ads are still there.

The formats they rely on

Count the formats. A competitor running mostly document ads is often trading a PDF for contact details through a lead form, which means it is building a nurture list. One leaning on single-image ads with a demo call to action is going straight for pipeline. If every competitor in your category uses a format you have never tried, test that format before you write another headline.

The landing pages they send traffic to

Follow each ad's link and note what kind of page it lands on, whether that is a demo form, a pricing page, a campaign page or a blog post. When several long-running ads point at one page, that page converts well enough to keep funding, so read it closely and compare its headline, proof and form length with yours. Campaign pages are often missing from the competitor's navigation, and its ads are the easiest way to find them.

Then write your own ads on the same buyer needs, in your own words, and test them against what you run now. Copying a rival's headline gets you its positioning without its brand.

See a competitor's LinkedIn ads in one report

Our LinkedIn Ad Finder takes a company name and either every country or one you choose, and pulls up to 24 of its most recently started ads from the LinkedIn Ad Library. It sorts them longest-running first and shows each ad's type, headline, description, call to action, landing page with tracking parameters removed, whether it is still running, and its start and end dates and impressions range where LinkedIn publishes them, such as 10k-20k impressions. A summary gives the number of ads LinkedIn lists in total, how many are running now, how many started in the last 30 days, a count of ad types and every advertiser name the search matched, so regional branches and similar company names stand out.

If LinkedIn lists more than 24 ads, the report says so, and limiting the search to one country shows a different slice. It does not show spend or who saw the ads, and it does not reproduce images or video. Each ad links to its page in the Ad Library for the creative. It covers LinkedIn only, so use the Facebook and Instagram ad finder for Meta. A run costs 5 credits, and a run that finds no ads is refunded.