There is no download button in the Meta Ad Library, but you can save what you see, and you should. Non-political ads disappear the moment they stop running, so anything you have not captured is gone permanently.
What is worth saving, and what is not
Most people save the wrong thing. They screenshot the image, build a folder of hundreds of them, and end up with a swipe file that tells them nothing.
The image is the least portable part of an ad. What actually transfers to your own work is the text and the timing:
- The opening line, which is the part doing the work in the first three seconds
- The offer and the risk-reversal — what they promise and what removes the objection
- The start date, so you can tell a tested winner from an untested experiment
- The destination URL, including their UTM parameters, which shows how they segment campaigns internally
- The variant count, because fifteen versions of one concept means they are scaling it
A spreadsheet with those five columns beats a folder of a thousand screenshots, and it stays useful after the ads come down.
What you may not do with what you save
Saved creative is reference material for analysis. Reusing a competitor's photography, video or copy in your own advertising is a copyright and trade mark question regardless of where you found it, and it is covered in is it legal to look at competitor ads.
The practical case against copying is stronger than the legal one anyway. Their winning ad is tuned to their brand, price and proof. What survives the transfer is the format, which is the part that matters least.
Save on a schedule, not on a hunch
Because the library is a live view, a monthly capture of a competitor's live set gives you something the platform never will: a history. Six months of monthly captures shows you what they killed, what they kept, and what they scaled, which is the actual competitive picture.