What watching means
Saving ads captures moments. Watching captures movement. Put an advertiser on your watch list and CreativeScout checks their ads in the EU ad library once a day, records what launched and what stopped, and builds a history you can read on the advertiser's page. If you opt in, a morning email tells you what changed overnight.
Starting to watch
The Watch toggle lives in two places: as a column on the Pages overview, and as a button right next to the advertiser's name on their page. One click starts the daily scan, one click stops it.
Watching needs a real Meta page ID, because the daily scan asks the library "show me everything this page runs". Ads added by hand without a page ID, and TikTok advertisers (whose library reports no advertiser ID at all), cannot be watched; their toggle simply does not appear.
The cap, and why it exists
Each workspace can watch up to 25 advertisers, and each watched advertiser costs about 2 credits per day, every day, whether or not anything happened. That is deliberate: a watch list is a shortlist of the competitors you actually act on, not an archive. When the list is full, unwatch someone before adding the next.
The daily scan
Once a day, around 04:30 UTC, CreativeScout scans every watched advertiser: which ads are live, which appeared since yesterday, which disappeared. Each scan becomes a daily snapshot, and the snapshots become the history below. A scan that already ran today never runs twice, so the cost stays exactly what the cap page says.
The morning digest
The digest is one email per morning, sent around 8:00 Berlin time (06:00 UTC), covering all watched advertisers of your workspaces: what they launched and what they stopped the day before. Quiet days send nothing; no activity, no email.
The digest is opt-in per user and off by default. Switch it on under Settings, Daily digest. Each person on the team decides for themselves; watching an advertiser never subscribes anyone to email.
The 30-day dashboard
On a watched advertiser's page, the Advertiser history section turns the snapshots into a 30-day read:
- Launched and stopped ads per day: the testing rhythm. A cluster of launches followed by mass stops is a creative test; steady launches with few stops is scaling.
- Active ads over time: the size of the running portfolio, day by day.
- Launch cadence: a one-word summary of the rhythm: daily, weekly or sporadic, plus the average number of new ads per week.
- Active now and total in library: the current counts behind the charts.
History starts on the day you start watching; the charts appear with the second snapshot and grow from there. We only record what the library reports each day, nothing is backfilled or estimated.
Funnels stay fresh too
For watched advertisers, CreativeScout also revisits their funnel and landing page screenshots about once a month. Each page is first checked cheaply for changes; a new screenshot version is only captured and stored when the page actually changed. Unchanged pages keep their existing version, so your funnel timeline shows real revisions, not thirty identical copies.
Costs at a glance
- Watching an advertiser: about 2 credits per day, per advertiser.
- Two workspaces watching the same advertiser share one scan; nobody pays twice.
- Unwatching stops the daily cost immediately. The history already recorded stays.