Your first Adligator search: a winning ad in 60 seconds

New tools are easier to trust when the first thing you see is data you already know. So before you go competitor-hunting, run your first Adligator search on a brand you already understand — your own, or one you respect. The point of this guide is less "find ads" and more build the muscle memory for everything else in the app.

It takes about a minute.

Step 1 — Type a brand or product in the top search bar

Open Adligator at app.adligator.com and click into the big search bar on the Creatives tab. Start typing a brand name, product name, or even a keyword from an ad you have seen recently — shein, ridge wallet, your-competitor.com all work.

As you type, Adligator opens an autocomplete panel with two kinds of suggestions.

Step 2 — Pick the right row from autocomplete

The autocomplete panel splits suggestions into two sections:

• Search by phrase (one row at the top) — runs a broad keyword search across ad copy. Use this for niche-wide research like weight loss patches or ai resume builder.
• FB pages (everything below) — each row is one specific Facebook page Adligator has already indexed. Click one and the grid loads every ad that page is running, scoped to that single advertiser.

For your first search, click an FB page row. It is the cleanest path to a brand-scoped result grid — no false positives from sound-alike brand names.

Step 3 — Sort by "Longest running" to surface the winners

You will land on a result grid showing every ad that page has run, freshest at the top. For a first-look that tells you "what is actually working", change the sort.

Click the sort dropdown in the top-right of the grid (it defaults to Newest in database) and pick Longest running. Adligator re-ranks the grid by how many continuous days each ad has been live — winners first.

Why this matters. Long-running ads are the strongest signal an ad library can give you. If a brand has kept a creative live for 60+ days, they are almost certainly making money on it — performance marketers do not pay to keep losers in market.

Step 4 — Read three signals on every card

You do not need to open every ad. The card itself surfaces most of what you need:

1. Run time — the small badge next to the page name ("4 days", "73 days") tells you how long the ad has been alive. The longer the run, the safer the bet that the creative is profitable.
2. GEO — the row that reads GEO: 1 country (or 5, or 12) tells you the campaign's geographic spread. One country usually means a hyper-targeted test; many countries means the brand has globalized it.
3. Platforms — Facebook / Instagram / Audience Network / Threads. The mix tells you where the brand believes the creative is working this quarter.

Three numbers, read in under five seconds, and you already know whether the ad is worth opening.

Step 5 — Open a card to see the rest

Click Open details on an ad with a long run time and a GEO that matches your own market. The detail page gives you the exact dates, days active, languages, full platform list, and the original ad copy / headline — all parsed cleanly so you do not have to squint at the Meta Ad Library.

That right-hand column is the single biggest reason marketers move from the native Meta Ad Library to Adligator: every field you would have hunted for manually is already lifted out for you.

What to do next

You have just done in 60 seconds what most marketers spend an hour on inside the native Meta Ad Library. Three things worth doing before you close the tab:

• Save the best ad to a Collection so it does not get lost. (One click from the card.)
• Set up a Tracker on this brand if you want Adligator to surface only the new ads next time you log in. Read the Trackers deep dive for how.
• Try a GEO filter. If you run ads in a single market, set GEO to that country and re-search — the grid tightens dramatically and the patterns become much more obvious.

The rest of Adligator Academy walks through these next steps one feature at a time. The single fastest payoff for a new account is setting up a Tracker on your top three competitors — that turns Adligator from "a place I go to" into "a place that messages me when something interesting happens."