The five tabs of Adligator — and when to use each

The Adligator app looks like five tabs across the top, and for good reason — each one corresponds to a different question you might walk in with. New users sometimes try to do everything from the Creatives tab and miss half the value. This article is the map.

If you have already run your first search, use this as a tour of where to go next. If you have not, start there — most of these tabs only make sense once a search is on the screen.

Creatives — the front door

Open this when you want to: find ads. Any ad, any brand, any vertical, any country.

The Creatives tab is what most people picture when they think of Adligator. A single hero search bar, an autocomplete panel underneath, and a grid of ads as soon as you type a brand or a keyword. Every other tab in the app exists to do something to the ads you find here — save them, watch them, analyze them.

Two search modes share this tab:

• Phrase search — broad keyword match across ad copy. Best for "what is everyone in vertical X running?" research.
• FB page search — picks one specific Facebook page from the autocomplete and shows only that advertiser's ads. Best for "what is competitor X running?" research.

The 13 filters (GEO, Days active, Platform, Display format, CTA, and ten others) all live here too, in a panel that drops open from the right of the search bar. The filters deep dive covers each one.

Pages — every advertiser at a glance

Open this when you want to: confirm which Facebook page a brand actually advertises from, or browse pages in a vertical without diving into individual ads.

The Pages tab lists Facebook pages, not ads. Each row shows the page name, avatar, total ads ever indexed, currently active count, and rejected count over the page's lifetime. Click a row and you jump back to Creatives with the search scoped to that single page.

This tab solves three concrete problems:

1. Brand-name collisions. "Ridge" might be a wallet, a coffee shop, and a financial advisor. The Pages tab lets you see all three at once with their ad volumes and pick the right one.
2. Vertical sweeps. Typing a phrase in the Pages tab returns which pages run that kind of ad, sorted by ad volume. Faster than reading 200 individual ads.
3. Sanity checks. If a competitor seems to have "no ads", the Pages tab will tell you whether they have a page at all, and whether everything on it is currently inactive.

One thing the Pages columns do not tell you: how many of those ads ran against your specific keyword. Total / Active / Rejected describe the page's whole lifetime, not the slice that matched your search.

Trackers — saved searches that come to you

Open this when you want to: monitor a brand over time instead of re-running the same search every Monday.

A Tracker is a saved search Adligator re-runs for you. Configure it once (brand + country + format + anything else you filter on) and Adligator surfaces only the new ads on every subsequent visit. It also unlocks the Analytics tab scoped to that Tracker — the most distinctive screen in the app.

Trackers live in a popup you open from the top of the Creatives tab. Each row shows the tracker name, the page or phrase being watched, the unread count since you last opened it, and a hover menu for renaming or deleting.

Use Trackers as a feed: pin your top 3–5 competitors, open the popup at the start of every working day, and you have a 30-second briefing on what they shipped overnight.

Collections — the swipe folder

Open this when you want to: save an ad worth remembering. Or build a reference library you can share with a designer.

Collections are folders of ads you have explicitly chosen to keep. Every ad card in the app has a bookmark icon — clicking it drops the ad into your default collection. Open the Collections tab and you can rename folders, drag ads between them, or share a folder by link with a teammate.

A few rules of thumb:

• Save in the moment. If you spent twenty minutes finding an ad, save it. The same ad can drop out of Meta's library tomorrow.
• One folder per project, not one per competitor. "Q3 2026 hooks" is more useful than "SHEIN ads" — you will go looking for hooks, not brands.
• Trackers do not auto-save into Collections. Saving is a deliberate choice, by design. A Tracker is "watch this"; a Collection is "keep this."

Analytics — pattern, not ads

Open this when you want to: see the shape of a brand's strategy, not individual ads.

Analytics is the screen that has no equivalent in Meta's native Ad Library. Once you save a Tracker, the Analytics tab unlocks with that Tracker's data sliced four ways:

• Launches over time — bar chart of when this brand pushes new creative. The Heatmap sub-view inside Analytics overlays day-of-week and hour-of-day on top, so you can see, for example, that they re-launch every Sunday evening.
• Visuals breakdown — image vs video vs carousel mix, with sample creatives in each bucket.
• Copy patterns — most-used phrases, headline structures, CTA button distribution.
• Country mix — which markets the brand prioritizes and how that has shifted over the selected time range.

The Creatives tab gives you the what. Analytics gives you the why now.

How the five tabs talk to each other

Reading the tabs left to right also walks the maturity curve of a new account:

1. Day 1 — Creatives. Search, scroll, look at ads.
2. Day 2 — Collections. You found something worth keeping. Save it.
3. Week 1 — Pages. A vertical sweep gives you 5–10 advertisers to monitor.
4. Week 2 — Trackers. Pin those advertisers. Stop re-searching.
5. Month 1 — Analytics. Read the patterns. Move from "what are they running" to "what is their strategy."

The trap most new users fall into is staying in step 1 forever. The compounding value of Adligator lives in steps 4 and 5 — that is when the app stops being a search engine and starts being a competitive intelligence dashboard.

The next article walks through the anatomy of a single result card so you can read everything on a Creatives row at a glance: Reading an Adligator creative card.