The Indicator Guide to investigating digital ad libraries

Digital ads are used to sell products, grow email lists, persuade voters, generate donations, build brands, and more. Nearly a trillion dollars are spent annually on digital ads and the majority of them are placed via major platforms like Google, Meta, and Amazon.

Digital ads are also used in influence operations, scams, and different forms of digital exploitation and cybercrime. For example, Indicator has in the past year or so identified thousands of ads on Meta and Google that promoted abusive nudifer/undresser services, which create explicit images and videos using a photo of a real person.

But digital ads remain a blind spot for many investigators, researchers, and reporters. One of the easiest and most powerful ways to get started with investigating digital ads is to use ad libraries.

Every digital investigator should know how to dig through digital ad libraries. Aside from use cases like scams, disinformation, and propaganda, ad libraries are useful for everyday tasks like backgrounding people, companies, and entities, and with researching websites and apps.

What follows is a deep dive guide for using ad libraries in digital investigations, tips for each of the 13 ad libraries currently in existence, as well as a rundown of additional tools you can use to examine digital political ads. We’re making the latest news and updates section available for free, but the rest of the guide is for paying members. Upgrade now to read all of it, and to access our growing library of guides, video workshops, and reporting.

This section will be updated with notable changes or new info about the digital ad libraries covered in this guide.

Oct 14 — Meta and Google have stopped accepting and archiving, political and social issues ads in the EU. Even worse, Google nuked its entire archive of EU political ads without warning. 

The companies’ action is in response to the EU’s Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising regulation, which went into effect on Oct. 10. The TTPA mandates additional disclosure and consent requirements for platforms that accept political ads, among other rules.

As a result of Meta and Google’s decision, investigators have access to less EU ad data than before. You can’t look at archival political ad data on Google, and Meta has stopped accepting ads for, and disclosing data about, a wide range of topics in the EU. Here's a list of the topics that Meta considers to be “social issues” in the EU, and therefore won’t accept ads for:

This could have far reaching consequences for nonprofits and advocacy groups in the EU, according to Sam Jeffers, the executive director of Who Targets Me, a UK organization that creates tools and research about digital political advertising. (You can learn more about one of its tools at the end of this guide.) 

“It's nonprofit fundraising, it's any advocacy issues whatsoever, whether or not they're connected to an election or not,” he told Indicator. “Meta has removed a large amount of advertising of stuff that really has very little to do with day-to-day politics.”

Jeffers said Meta’s objection to the legislation stems in part from the requirement that companies receive user consent for certain types of targeted political advertising. Google objected because it would have had to add functionality to its existing political ad library, and to perform additional advertiser verification, among other issues, according to Jeffers.

“They would have had to verify way more advertisers. They would have had to handle local elections and all sorts of things that they don't include in their current data,” he said of Google.

A Google spokesperson pointed me to the company’s statement about its decision, which said that the TTPA “introduces significant new operational challenges and legal uncertainties for political advertisers and platforms.”

It added:

Meta’s statement said it removed political and issues ads in the EU due to what it called the “unworkable requirements and legal uncertainties introduced” by the TTPA. It added:

Who Targets Me was the first to note that Google had removed all of its historical EU political ad data. Jeffers also told me that Meta removed some of the more granular data that you could see about political and social issues ads in the EU, including details about audience targeting and daily spend tracking.

“Now you only get an all-time spend window since 2019,” for a political advertiser account, he said.

The latest reports about the dispute say that the platforms and EU policymakers are in discussions about the TTPA. We will update this if anything changes.