How to see your active ads in Ads Manager

The Ads Manager table shows everything that ever existed in the account, which makes "which ads are running" a less obvious question than it should be. Three settings fix it, and they hold for good once done.

The three levels, and where you should be

Ads Manager has tabs for campaigns, ad sets and ads. To see running pieces, you want the third.

Campaigns shows objective and totals. Useful for budget, useless for creative.

Ad sets shows audience and budget. Where allocation gets decided.

Ads shows the pieces. This is where you see what people are seeing.

Plenty of people try to answer a creative question from the campaigns tab and conclude nothing can be seen. It can — from the right tab.

The filter that fixes it

There is a filter in the top bar. Add the delivery condition and choose active.

That removes paused, finished, drafts and rejected in one move. What remains is what is genuinely being delivered right now.

Worth saving that filter: Ads Manager lets you store named filters, and "active now" is the one you will use daily.

The date filter, which deceives more than any other

Cause number one of "my list is empty": the date range.

Ads Manager opens on a default period. An ad with no delivery inside that range does not appear in the table, even while active.

If the list looks incomplete, widen the period before suspecting anything else. And keep in mind the period affects every column's numbers: the same ad shows different spend on different ranges, and that is not an inconsistency.

The columns that make the table informative

The default column set is generic. What turns the table into a decision tool, for a direct-response account:

Six columns. The last three exist to answer the question the third one raises: when cost per result rises, was it more expensive media or a less interesting ad? Two causes with opposite fixes, and without CPM and CTR side by side there is no way to know.

Save that set as a named view. The Ads Manager default serves almost nobody.

How to see the piece as it is

Seeing the ad in the table is not seeing the ad. To see it as the audience sees it, use the preview: at the ad level there is an option to view it in each placement.

That matters because the same piece behaves differently in feed, Stories and Reels. Text that would fit in the feed gets cut in Stories, and the call to action that was visible disappears behind the interface.

And do not go looking for your own ad by scrolling Facebook. You are almost never in the audience, and not finding it means nothing.

Why numbers do not match across tabs

The sum of ads differing from the ad set total, and from the campaign total. It happens and it is not an error.

The reason is deduplication: the same person may have seen two ads in the same ad set. In the ad set total they count once; summing the ads, they count twice. Reach does not add, and the difference shows.

Spend does sum correctly. Reach and attributed results, not necessarily. It is the same mechanism described in reach or impressions.

The statuses that confuse people

The delivery column has more states than active and paused, and some mean the opposite of what they look like.

Active. The object is switched on. It does not guarantee delivery: the ad inside may be rejected.

In review. The piece is in the approval queue. It does not deliver and does not spend.

Not delivering. The most deceptive: switched on and nothing goes out. The cause sits outside the object itself.

Limited learning. Delivers with unstable performance, because the optimized event does not happen often enough.

Outside schedule. An ad set with dayparting, viewed outside its window.

Completed. It reached the end of its schedule. Drops out of the active filter and stays in the account.

The most expensive confusion is between active and not delivering. The first is the state of the switch; the second, the state of delivery. Seeing green and assuming it is running is how a full day with zero impressions goes unnoticed — the diagnosis is in Meta Ads not delivering.

Seeing someone else's ads

There is a legitimate, public source: Meta's Ad Library. It lists any Page's active ads, with start dates and placements, and no metrics at all.

It serves two purposes well: understanding which angle a competitor is testing, and confirming how long one of their creatives has been live — which suggests it works.

It does not serve for copying. You see the piece and not the audience, the offer, the landing page or the result.

The two-minute routine

What is worth checking every Monday, in this order:

1. Active filter, seven closed days.
2. Sort by spend, highest first.
3. Read cost per result on the top three rows.
4. If one rose, check CPM and CTR on the same row.
5. Write down what changed, with the date.

Step 5 is what turns the routine into a time series. Without a record, every Monday starts from zero. The full structure is in weekly ad report.

If you manage several accounts

Ads Manager's limitation shows here: it is built for one account at a time. With ten clients, answering "what is running across everything" means ten openings, ten filters and ten column sets.

There is an all-accounts view, and it is limited in columns and filtering. For an operation with many accounts, the practical path is a screen that already brings them all — the subject is in managing multiple ad accounts and the tracking model on the paid media reporting page.