How to research med spa competitor ads (with a live example)

Most med spa marketing advice is written from the inside: your website, your reviews, your own offers. The ads your neighbours are running right now, which patients scroll past every day, sit in public libraries that very few clinic owners or agencies open twice. We pulled a slice of them to see what med spa competitor ads actually look like, and what you can fairly say about them.

How do you research med spa competitor ads?

You research med spa competitor ads by listing the clinics that compete for your patients, finding each one's advertiser account in the public ad libraries, reading what is live, and turning the gaps into a brief or pitch. The routine:

1. List five to ten competitors in your market: the nearest med spas, any plastic surgery practice that sells the same injectables or body treatments, and one or two multi-location chains.
2. Find each advertiser account on Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google. Names collide, so match the logo, website and city.
3. Read every live ad: treatment, offer, price, button, landing page, format.
4. Check the start dates. An ad live for months and a batch launched this week tell different stories.
5. Tag what you see against the signals in the checklist below: promotions, consult-first offers, financing, credentials, seasonal pushes.
6. Write down the gaps: what nobody in your market says, and what everybody says the same way.

Budget an afternoon for ten clinics by hand (our estimate, not a measured time). The same routine covers aesthetic clinic competitor ads and plastic surgery practices; they sit in the same libraries. For the mechanics of each library, our guide to using the Facebook Ad Library covers the clicks; this post is about med spa competitor research in particular: what to look for in this vertical, with real numbers to calibrate against.

What did a live pull of US med spa ads show?

A capped pull of US Meta ads on October 25, 2026 found a market of price-led, new-patient offers, a lot of near-duplicate ads, and plenty of advertisers who aren't clinics at all. Here's the method, so you can judge it.

Method. We used Proxy from a Claude Code session on October 25, 2026 (Sydney time). Four keyword searches on the Meta Ad Library, country set to the US, active ads only, up to 50 results each, plus one brand pull (up to 25 ads) for a large national body contouring brand. That's Meta only; we didn't pull Google, LinkedIn or TikTok. The run used about 51 credits. Every result is a capped first page of a much larger library (the library estimated 23,222 matches for "med spa" alone), so read the counts as a sample, not a census.

Search (US, active)	Sort	Ads	Advertisers	Formats	Median days running
"med spa"	default relevancy	50	13	23 image, 16 text-only, 6 video, 5 carousel or multi-version	0 to 3 (all started in the last 3 days)
"med spa"	largest advertisers first	50	43	18 carousel or multi-version, 16 image, 16 video	251
"body contouring"	largest advertisers first	50	29	31 carousel or multi-version, 11 video, 7 image, 1 text	201
"botox"	largest advertisers first	21	15	13 video, 3 image, 3 carousel or multi-version, 2 text	194

The default sort turned out to be a "newest" slice, so we used the largest-advertiser sort for anything about run length. Run length is days from an ad's start date to the pull. It is not a performance measure.

In the 50 largest-advertiser "med spa" ads, 39 were clinic or med spa ads. Of those 39:

What the ad copy showed	Clinic ads (of 39)
An explicit price or discount	14
New clients or first visit only	12
A time or slot limit	8
A credibility cue (credentials, review count, award, client volume)	6
A consultation as the lead offer	3
Financing	0

Those counts come from our read of the headline, link description and body text, and they're lower bounds. Some things stood out.

Clinics aren't the only ones advertising to your patients' feed, or to you. Our pull found that in the default "med spa" slice, 10 of 50 ads (from two advertisers) were selling marketing services to med spa owners, not treatments to patients. In the largest-advertiser sample it was 5 of 50, plus 4 retail or publisher ads that only used the words "med spa".

The longest-running ads were the least specific. The oldest ad in the sample, a generic image ad with no offer, had been live since November 2020 (2,171 days). The longest-running ad with a visible price was a per-unit injectable price for new patients, live 872 days. Long-running does not mean profitable (ads get forgotten), but it does mean someone hasn't felt the need to change them.

Urgency copy and start dates don't always agree. Three differently named clinics ran the same "anti-aging facial for $59, five days only" ad, each linking to a page with the same address pattern on a shared app-hosting domain. That suggests a shared template or vendor (an inference, not something the library states). Their start dates were 155, 156 and 241 days before our pull. Treat "this month only" as a framing device, not a calendar. Honestly, we'd read that one as a template, not a flash sale.

One account can fill a page. A single clinic account supplied 16 of the 50 ads in the default slice, text-only, built from three copy blocks. Counting ads overstates how many ideas a competitor has.

Body contouring is dominated by two names. In the 50 "body contouring" results, 21 came from two advertisers: AirSculpt (12) and Groupon (9, deal listings from local clinics and spas). The AirSculpt pull below shows how few ideas sit behind many ads.

Seasonal pushes show up fast. Six of the 50 default-slice ads (three advertisers) were seasonal on October 25: a Halloween price list, a Black Friday countdown in Spanish, and a holiday under-eye special.

"Botox" mostly returned non-clinics. Of 21 ads for "botox", 19 weren't clinic ads: 17 were "Shop now" skincare product ads, several positioned against injections. The keyword search matched loosely, which is a reminder to read results and drop the noise.

Ads cross borders. Spanish-language ads turned up in a US-filtered search (6 of 50 in the default slice), and clinics in Seoul, Bangkok and Colombia appeared in the "botox" and "body contouring" samples. If you work in Latin America or Europe, run the same search with your country code.

Count the ideas, not the ads.

A brand pull makes the "many ads, few ideas" point concrete. AirSculpt returned 25 active ads (17 carousel or multi-version, 4 video, 4 image) with only six distinct headlines: nine said "Dramatic Results. Minimal Downtime.", eight said "Transform Your Body", four said "Better Than Lipo", two said "Get Your Pre-Baby Body", and one each said "Your permanent transformation." and "Regain Your Confidence". All 25 used a "Learn more" button and sent people to three landing pages. The oldest started on August 12, 2025. Those are the advertiser's own claims, quoted, not verified by us.

What should you look for in a med spa's ads?

Look for seven signals: promotions and packages, consult-first offers, treatment-led versus outcome-led angles, financing, provider credibility, seasonal pushes, and who else shares the feed. Here is each one, with what the pull showed.

Signal	What the pull showed	Question to ask
Promotions and packages	Per-unit and per-session prices, "$59 facial", percent off a first visit, a $489 package at $79, marketplace deals up to 70% off	Is the offer a price, a bundle or a freebie, and who is it for?
Consult-first	Only 3 of 39 clinic ads led with a consultation, while a national brand used "Book a consultation now" on most of its ads	Do rivals sell the visit or the conversation?
Treatment-led vs outcome-led	Mostly treatment names (neurotoxin, filler, HydroFacial, CoolTone); outcome lines like "Bring Back Your Natural Glow" were rarer	Does anyone talk about the occasion (bridal, post-pregnancy) instead of the device?
Financing	Zero of 39 clinic ads, though one ad in the default slice listed Klarna, Afterpay and Affirm	Is financing on the landing page instead, and is that a gap you could use?
Provider credibility	Nurse practitioners, "physician-performed", an award, 537 reviews, "100,000 clients"	Who shows a face or a credential, and who shows only a machine?
Seasonal pushes	Halloween, Black Friday, holiday, bridal	What's the next date in your calendar that nobody has claimed?
The rest of the feed	Marketing vendors, skincare brands, marketplaces	Who else is competing for the same scroll?

This is where the vertical differs from a generic competitor audit. In a med spa market the offer is the creative: price, the new-patient condition and the button do most of the work, so read the text before the image. (Our competitor ad audit template gives you a sheet to record these fields.)

Treat before-and-after photos with extra care when you collect them; the next section says why.

What do health and cosmetic ad rules mean for what you see?

Health, cosmetic and before-and-after ads are governed by platform ad policies and by local law, so an ad being live in a library doesn't tell you it complies. This is a pointer to what to read, not legal or medical advice, and we make no claim about any treatment's quality or safety.

• Meta. Per Meta's Health and Wellness ad standard, on its Transparency Center, before-and-after depictions of cosmetic products, procedures and surgeries are among the content allowed only for audiences aged 18 or older, and statements of inferiority about physical appearance are barred (as we read it on October 26, 2026). Read the Meta page.
• Google. Per Google's Healthcare and medicines policy, some healthcare content can't be advertised at all and other content is restricted by location or advertiser certification. The page we fetched didn't name cosmetic procedures, so check whether your treatments fall under it. Read the Google page.
• United States. Per the FTC's health claims guidance, "Companies must support their advertising claims with solid proof." Read the FTC page. Other countries, including those in Latin America, have their own rules; ask a qualified adviser before you copy a competitor's claim.

Policies change. When did you last re-read the ones your creative depends on?

What can't ad libraries tell you?

Ad libraries can't tell you what a competitor spends, how many patients an ad brought in, or which ad is working. For ordinary commercial ads the public libraries don't publish spend, and none of them publish results.

What you can see is narrower: which ads are live, their format and copy, their button and landing page, and when each started. Run length is a hint (a forgotten ad and a winning ad both run for months). Anything you say about performance is a guess, so say "likely" and "suggests" in the deck. A spend figure on a slide came from an estimate somewhere, not from the library.

How do you turn what you see into a pitch or brief?

You turn the observations into a pitch or brief by picking the three most specific gaps and writing each as a fact, a so-what and a test. For a pitch to a clinic:

1. Where they show up. Which platforms and formats the clinic uses against its rivals.
2. What they say. Offers, claims and angles, with two or three ads quoted and attributed to the library.
3. The opening. One gap you noticed, for example that no rival leads with a consultation or financing.

Lead outreach with the single most accurate observation, not a clever line. For a creative brief, the fields come straight from the checklist: offer, audience condition (new clients only?), proof (credential, reviews), button, landing page, and the date you're timing around. Our post on writing a creative brief from competitor ads has the structure, and researching a prospect's ads before a pitch covers the pitch side. Prospecting for clinics that already run ads? See how to find prospects running Meta ads.

Can you do this for free without Proxy?

Yes, and for one market it's the right call. The Meta Ad Library and Google Ads Transparency Center are free, need no login, and show what we described above.

Library	Where	Search by
Meta (Facebook and Instagram)	Meta Ad Library	Clinic name, or a keyword such as "med spa" with your country set
Google (Search, YouTube, Display)	Ads Transparency Center	Advertiser name or website

The catch is time. Each library shows one advertiser at a time, keyword search returns noise, and you copy results into a sheet by hand. Ten clinics on two platforms is manageable. Ten clinics in five countries is where it starts to hurt. For the Google side, see how to check a competitor's Google ads. Which route fits depends on how many clinics you're watching and how often.

How do you do it faster with Proxy?

You do it faster by asking an AI assistant connected to Proxy for the same pull and the same tagging, in one conversation. Proxy gives Claude, ChatGPT and other MCP-compatible assistants live access to the Meta, Google and LinkedIn ad libraries and TikTok's EU ads, with no API keys. You might ask:

• "Search Meta for active US ads about med spa, largest advertisers first, and split the clinics from the vendors."
• "For the three biggest clinics, pull their active ads and list offers, formats and how long each has run."
• "Which of these offers are new-client-only or time-limited, and which clinics mention financing?"
• "Do the same for Colombia and Mexico, and tell me what's different."

Be clear about the limits. Our run used about 51 credits, more than the free tier's 20 a day, so on the free plan you'd spread it over a few days or lower the limits. The keyword searches match loosely, so you still read the results and decide what's noise. And it's public ad-library data only: no spend, no results. The point is to hand off the pulling and tagging, so more of your time goes to the pitch. Setup is on the install page, and the general guide to seeing competitor ads in ChatGPT and Claude walks through it. To keep watch after the first pull, see how to monitor competitor ads and promotions.

Where should you start this week?

Start with your five nearest rivals and one library. Open the Meta Ad Library, find each clinic, and write down the offer, the button and the start date before you open a design tool. When the list gets long enough that you'd rather ask than open another tab, hand it to your assistant. The ads are public; the edge is reading them before your next campaign, not after.