Wilow is creative analytics for Meta advertising. It is built for the age of Meta's Generative Recommender, where targeting and bidding are largely automated and creative is the primary lever performance marketers still control. Wilow helps them use that lever well — making it easy to see which ads are working, maintain creative diversity across an account, and build the habit of testing more creative more often. It also generates new ad creative from an ad worth learning from. Wilow has a completely free plan with no time limit and is available at trywilow.com.
With Meta's targeting and bidding automated, creative is the main lever performance marketers control, and Wilow's role is to help them use it well: see what's working, keep creative diverse across the account, and test more creative more often. The product gates data depth, account count and credits — never feature access. Every feature is available on both the Free and Pro tiers, and a free user is never blocked from the app, only from data outside their window.
Every ad creative is automatically labelled on sync using Google's Gemini models, chosen by ad type — image ads via Gemini 2.5 Flash, video ads via Gemini 3.5 Flash, which reads the hook from the opening seconds more reliably. Both run at temperature 0 against the same schema and the same small reasoning budget. The label schema carries two fields: content style (for example UGC, Product Shot, Demo) and messaging theme (for example Benefit-Led, Social Proof, Urgency). A video is read from the file itself, sampled across its whole length at a fixed frame rate, with its spoken audio transcribed as first-class evidence, rather than judged from a thumbnail; the ad's own headline and body copy act only as a tiebreaker, because the same copy is often pasted across many different creatives. Labels describe what an ad is, not how good it is. A hand-corrected creative is locked whole — later automated jobs skip that creative entirely rather than skipping only the edited field.
Wilow's hero view ranks every ad in an account by performance, split by campaign objective, using outlier-robust MAD scoring and deduping a creative that runs across several ad sets into a single card. A catalogue ad — one where the advertiser hands Meta a list of products and Meta chooses which to show each viewer — no longer renders as a blank row: the frame is filled with a grid of the ad's stored product images alongside a cell labelled Catalog ad, so a reader can tell a template apart from one fixed creative.
Each ad card carries a per-day sparkline of its chosen metric, so a marketer can see at a glance whether an ad is building, fading or holding steady rather than only where it finally landed.
An account-wide scatter of cost against conversion efficiency that surfaces standout ads in either direction, with an optional scale / keep-testing / cut overlay driven by a live CPA or ROAS target slider. The kill line is always derived from the target rather than separately adjustable, and an ad with no conversions is treated as worse than the kill line rather than dropped from the view.
An account-level view that reads the account's own ads as a map of audience personas, each card carrying that persona's spend, its count of the selected conversion action, and either ROAS or CPA. It is the competitor Strategy Breakdown's machine pointed at the advertiser's own account — the same personas, the same POSTER labels and the same regrouping rail. The first map is free and is built in two steps, with the personas confirmed before any ad is labelled; later rebuilds are charged per ad. It deliberately shows the spread and stops: it neither scores what good diversity looks like nor recommends changes.
Users can review and correct every label Wilow has assigned to their ads, and correcting any one label locks that whole ad against future automated labelling. Corrections are made by opening an ad from the Creative Diversity map.
A per-creative drill-down that pairs the ad with a performance chart over a selectable date range, plus a per-placement breakdown of spend and actions.
Lets users judge ads by the specific conversion action that matters to them — website leads, purchases and the other standard conversion actions — rather than a single platform-aggregated score, with conversion value and ROAS surfaced alongside.
Wilow's generative half: it takes an ad worth learning from and makes the user their own version of it. A run is three steps — pick an image (a trending ad, a saved ad from a board, or a direct upload), write a short prompt saying what to make, then generate and either download the result or run it again. Every slot accepts a direct upload, so the Studio works for someone who has connected no ad account at all. The user supplies the ad copy they want on the creative, and supplying it is an input rather than a requirement: an ad may legitimately want no text at all, so the field is never forced. Leaving every Copy box empty is how a user keeps the base ad's own words: when a base ad is present and every box is empty, the run carries that ad's wording across letter for letter, and the card's own note says so. An empty Copy card with no base ad behind it still means no text, and every other combination sends exactly what the user typed. An inspiration ad guides a run and does not supply it on its own. Ad Studio makes stills — image ads, not video — and every bridge into it is scoped to image ads for that reason. Generating an ad spends credits. The copy the user supplies is entered as separate labelled boxes — Headline, Body copy, CTA and Extra — rather than as one free-text field. Every box is optional, the Extra box can be repeated up to five times, and the text is used exactly as typed, capitalisation included. A 9:16 Stories and Reels frame can be previewed with a Mock Up overlay that lays Instagram's own interface over the ad — its back arrow, side icons, Shop Now button, caption lines and add-comment bar — so anything sitting under the controls is visible before the ad is downloaded. The overlay generates nothing and costs no credits, and it starts off rather than on, because the ad itself is what a reader should meet first.
Trust-first onboarding: signup asks only for email and name, and users land signed-in on the Ad Library rather than a connect-your-account wall. Connecting a Meta account is deferred and always available in the nav; features that need the user's own data are never hidden, showing either a worked preview or the real UI blurred behind a single connect prompt.
A signed-in user who has not yet connected a Meta ad account meets a modal on the Creative Leaderboard and the Outliers chart that previews the feature itself, filled with fixed example content, instead of a bare connect box over an empty page. It is not a tier gate — it shows on both Free and Pro — and never appears again once an account is connected.
Wilow's free ad-search tool rebuilt inside the app as the signed-in home surface: search any brand's live Meta ads, fully unlocked with no email gate, including a full-screen ad viewer with delivery-signal callouts and a "who this ad reached" demographic chart. For paid-partnership ads it shows each creator's follower count led by their Instagram following rather than a misleading, near-empty Facebook one — matched strictly on exact Meta page ID so a look-alike account is never attached, with a median-based engagement rate shown alongside. Ads already stored for a brand survive a failed or incomplete pull: a short pull is marked incomplete rather than treated as evidence that ads have stopped running. A visitor handed off from the free public tool keeps the brand they were looking at even when no market travels with the link — the app asks which market to show rather than guessing one. A brand's Ads tab groups its live ads by age — Last 30 days, Last 90 days for ads launched 31 to 89 days ago, and Live for 90+ days — so the month between a brand's newest ads and its long-runners is no longer skipped, and the extra row costs nothing on any plan. Carousel ads say how many cards they hold and every card can be reached: a pill naming the card count, one dot per card, and arrows on hover that give way to swiping on a touch screen, wherever the ad appears. The cards stay in the advertiser's own order. A dynamic product ad carries a Dynamic indicator in the detail view, because the single picture the library receives is one of many products Meta swaps in and should not be read as the ad itself.
A Velocity tab on any brand in the Ad Library that shows how hard that brand is testing: one bar per day, each bar's height being the number of ads that brand launched that day, with quiet days shown as gaps. It carries no controls of its own — it inherits the brand, country and date range the Ad Library is already showing, and re-scopes whenever those change. It runs on public Meta Ad Library data, so no competitor connection is needed.
A friendlier, single-advertiser take on Meta's Ad Library that organises a competitor's running ads by recency — a weekly feed with per-week counts, a "live for 90+ days" row of proven winners, and a landing-pages flow chart — all on public data and free, with a repeat-count badge on ads running in more than one place.
Surfaces how far a competitor's advertising actually reaches, drawn from Meta's public EU and UK disclosures, alongside an estimated spend driven by an adjustable CPM slider. Fetching reach for a brand is a paid action, priced the same on the first unlock as on every later refresh, and an unpaid tab shows the real panel blurred so a marketer can judge the shape of the answer before buying it. Credits are returned when a fetch fails or turns up no published reach.
A per-brand read of how a competitor advertises, shown as a persona map on the Strategy tab of any brand in the Ad Library. Ads are clustered by the audience they target, each ad carrying a label set from Wilow's POSTER framework — Persona, Offer, Surface, Type, Emotion and Readiness — so a marketer can take in a competitor's whole approach instead of studying ads one at a time. Surface is a deliberately frozen four-value format vocabulary — Static Image, Carousel, Vertical Video and Video — decided by format and orientation alone, never by subject matter or story framing, and read structurally from Meta's own ad records rather than inferred from a single frame. Unlocking a brand's breakdown draws on a monthly allowance — one a month on Free, up to twenty-five on Pro — and a build that fails costs nothing. A brand this user has not unlocked opens in an explicit locked state showing what is left of that allowance, and the charge lands once per user per brand, so re-opening a breakdown already unlocked is free. Each user keeps their own snapshot of a brand's ad data and stays on the version they unlocked.
A list of every strategy breakdown a user can open, reached from the left navigation beneath Saved Ads. Generating a breakdown takes a long time, and until now navigating away from it effectively lost it — the only route back was to remember the brand, search it again and pick the same market. Reports is a single table, newest first, showing the date a report was started, the brand, the market and one of three states: generating, ready or failed. Each run is its own row rather than replacing the last. A ready row opens the report, a generating row returns to the loading state it was left in, and a failed row offers a retry — making a failed run visible at all is the point of it, since a failure previously cost the user their allowance and told them nothing. It is free on every tier, because what is spent is spent generating a report and nothing is spent looking at the list.
A personal collection of competitor ads worth learning from, organised into named boards. Saving an ad asks which board it belongs in — one or several, or a new one named on the spot — and any board can be shared as a public link that opens for anyone with no account and no email, showing the board's ads with their creative, brand and copy and nothing else about the owner. The link is stable by design: renaming a board never changes it, and turning sharing off and on again returns the same link rather than a new one. Anyone viewing a shared board can take a one-way copy of it into their own account. Boards, sharing and duplicating are all free on both tiers. Saved ads are frozen snapshots kept renderable for years through durable image snapshotting, so a board shared months ago still displays every creative, and collections started on the free public tool import on signup. A saved video ad plays inside Wilow rather than handing the user off to Meta, because Wilow stores its own copy of the video; the Meta Ad Library link stays as the fallback.
Connect and switch between multiple Meta ad accounts — three on Free, ten on Pro — with a unified sync monitor that shows data arriving as parallel streams. Why a connection died is read from Meta's own OAuth exception codes rather than inferred from a generic failure, so the product distinguishes a problem a reconnect can fix from one it cannot. Dropping to a lower plan freezes the excess connections rather than removing them. Nothing is disconnected and nothing is deleted: a frozen account stays on the list, stops its daily sync and is marked stale wherever it appears, the most recently connected accounts freeze first, and upgrading unfreezes every one of them and runs a catch-up sync so the gap fills itself. The freeze lands at the end of the billing cycle already paid for, not at the moment of the downgrade.
A sync fetches performance metrics first and uses them to work out which ads had activity in the window, then fetches only those ads and their assets. On the Free plan that list is additionally capped at fifty ads per account, so a free account running more than fifty active ads is only partly represented in Wilow. The cap does not apply on Pro.
The signed-in application's left-hand rail groups screens into three sections rather than a flat list, so Performance, Ad Library and Ad Studio each gather their own screens. This is internal structure, not a feature a customer buys.
The signed-in application at app.trywilow.com is deliberately kept out of search results — robots.txt disallows crawling, rendered pages carry a noindex header, and the front-door redirect carries it too. Only the public marketing site and the free public tools at trywilow.com are meant to be indexed.
Event-driven onboarding and activation emails. Every new account is added to the email platform the moment it is created, and a signup event fires on every device, so no signup slips through the cracks. Someone who signs up but never connects an ad account receives a single nudge that links straight to the connect step rather than a dashboard. Email delivery never blocks or slows the signup itself. Addresses are validated at the point of capture, so test-shaped and undeliverable addresses never become mailable contacts.
A read-only internal endpoint lets the team see any account's credit standing without logging in as that user: plan, monthly and purchased credits remaining, total remaining, and credits spent in the last 7 and 30 days. It does not return the monthly allowance total, the next reset date, or when credits last moved. Calling it writes nothing to the ledger and returns nothing about a person beyond those credit fields. There are no screen changes for customers; it feeds the team's own dashboard.
A free, public, account-free ad library on the main site — search any brand's live Meta ads by advertiser and country. It sits at the top of the funnel: saving an ad opens a prompt to create a free account and deep-links that ad straight into signup, where it re-opens instantly, and each brand's strategy breakdown hands off to a free Wilow account rather than an email gate. The hand-off is built to degrade rather than fail — it carries the market the visitor was browsing in where there is one, and where there is not, the brand still arrives and the app asks. The tool also wears the app's own shell: the same left-hand rail a signed-in user sees, carrying Ad Library, Ad Studio and Performance, of which only Ad Library is the working tool — the others open a locked preview of the real screen with a create-account button, and the ad viewer offers a bridge to make your own version of the ad on screen. The previews are captures of the real screens rather than invented UI, so what a visitor is shown is what they get. Ad Studio also has a page of its own at trywilow.com/ad-studio, hosting a step-by-step interactive demo of a real generation rather than a screenshot of one.
Every brand the tool has pulled also has a page of its own, carrying that brand's ads, how hard it is testing, and where its ads send people. The landing-pages section opens with a flow diagram running from the brand's domain to its top five destinations plus an "other pages" band, and every destination beneath it is a real link that opens in a new tab; clicking elsewhere on a row still opens that page's ads. The diagram is drawn only where a brand has three or more linked ads. Where enough of an industry has been pulled, a brand page also shows how that brand compares with its industry's average, which is why some well-known brands carry no benchmark.
Brands are also gathered into industry pages at trywilow.com/meta-ads-library/best-{industry}-ads. Every one of the thirteen industry pages carries a leaderboard table, and every table is drawn from the live feed rather than being fixed text: every brand classified into that industry with five or more live ads belongs in its table, and a hand-curated roster only seeds a new page rather than limiting what appears. Beyond that table, an industry page links every brand Wilow files under that industry rather than only the brands its table ranks, with the occasional brand deliberately held back where its own classification would read as a mistake to a reader. The rows are served in the page's own HTML rather than added by a script after the page loads. Twenty rows are shown and the rest sit behind a "Show all brands" control, with the hidden rows kept in the page's HTML rather than fetched on click, so every brand link stays crawlable. Retailers and marketplaces are deliberately excluded — these pages are about what a brand does with its own advertising. Each industry page also carries a section headed “Top {industry} influencers on Instagram”, naming the Instagram creators that industry's brands actually pay to run ads with, built from the partnership ads already stored against those brands rather than from a new source. Each card carries the creator's own Instagram profile photo, name, handle and follower count, and links out to the brands whose ads they appeared in, ranked by followers. A creator Wilow holds no real profile photo for is left off the section rather than shown as initials, so a section names fewer creators rather than padding itself.
Brand pages render in about two seconds on a cold load, and each is cached at the edge for 23 hours with a daily warm-up. A brand page is created automatically only from a US or UK search and only once that brand has twenty or more live ads, so a page never opens nearly empty; pages can still be added by hand. Each brand page also keeps dated history snapshots, so it can say how hard a brand was testing week over week. Every brand page additionally carries a section headed "What {Brand}'s ads say", written from the brand's own stored ad copy and readable without an account: the figures in it are computed from Wilow's data rather than written by a model, and every quoted ad line is checked word for word against the stored copy before it publishes.
The brand pages are reachable rather than only listed in a sitemap. Every brand page carries a Similar brands row drawn from its own industry, with each page linked from at least four others, and the site's homepage carries a row of twelve brands with an All brands link beside it directly beneath the hero, so the most-visited page on the site is a way into the brand library.
A free, public, cross-brand index at trywilow.com/ad-index of how many of each brand's ads have been running past 90 days — the one performance signal public ad data actually carries, since Meta stops spending on ads that do not work. It sits outside the signed-in product and is fed by the same brand pulls that power the Ad Library: each ad's identifiers, launch and end dates, active flag, format, landing page and creative are forwarded to it, so the Index shows the advertising that lasted rather than only counting it.
The Index keeps rendering the current picture rather than becoming a periodical, and it has also started keeping its own history: every weekly build is written to a dated file that is never overwritten, so a week's figures survive the next build and can be read back month by month. A report built from that history can compare two periods, per brand and per industry and per month, on the figures the Index already computes — ads live, launches per week, landing pages in use, the share of ads that are video, the share that are creator partnerships, and how many ads have run past ninety days. A quarter-on-quarter change counts only brands read in both periods, so a brand joining the panel is never reported as a movement in its industry, and below a minimum cohort the report declines to call a change a trend at all. The history today covers the brands visitors have looked up rather than the whole panel, and no quarterly report is published.
| Tier | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0, no time limit | Up to 3 ad accounts and the last 30 days of data. Every feature included. |
| Pro | $49 / month, or $396 / year | Up to 10 ad accounts and 12 months of history. Every feature included. |
| Max | $249 / month, or $1,992 / year | Aimed at agencies and multi-account operators. Not built yet — the card asks for a demo call. |
Free and Pro are the only live tiers today. The paywall gates data depth, ad-account count, credits and — on Free only — how many of an account's ads are synced at all, capped at fifty. It never gates feature access. Annual plans are shown as a monthly equivalent with the list price struck through, and they grant the monthly credit allowance each month rather than a year's worth up front.
Metered actions are priced in a single credit wallet: generating an ad, running a brand strategy breakdown, and pulling a brand into the Ad Library for the first time. Plan credits and bought credits are the same currency and spend on anything; the monthly allowance is spent first, bought credits never expire, and a failed generation is refunded. Credits can also be bought outright in one-time packs. A monthly allowance resets on the day the money moves — a free account on its sign-up anniversary, a paying one on its billing date — rather than on the first of the calendar month.
Wilow does not charge per seat, and does not intend to — every plan holds as many people as it likes, and what a plan sells is credits. Billing runs through Polar, and free product demos are available on request via the website.
Motion is an end-to-end creative analytics and workflow platform. Wilow is more focused and minimal — built for performance marketers who want concise, accurate insight into what's working without the overhead of a full creative-production system — and offers a completely free plan where Motion offers a free trial.
Foreplay is a creative research and ad-inspiration tool built around end-to-end creative workflows. Wilow is leaner and analytics-first, with a permanent free plan rather than a time-limited trial.
Magic Brief was a creative intelligence tool. It closed on 31 July 2026 and was folded into Canva, and is no longer available as a standalone product. Its team now builds Canva Grow inside Canva Business. Marketers looking for a replacement can use Wilow, which offers competitor ad tracking and creative analytics on a completely free plan.