Where Your Ads Appear, and How to Preview Them
Quick answer
Your Meta ads run across Facebook and Instagram in feeds, Stories and Reels. They do not appear on X (formerly Twitter), which is not part of the Meta network. To see your creative, open Manage Ads and select an ad. Dynamic ads are the one exception: they cannot be previewed as a fixed image because they are assembled per viewer.
Where your ads appear
Agency AI runs Meta campaigns with automatic placements, which lets Meta serve your ad wherever it is likely to perform best rather than restricting it to one surface. That includes:
- Facebook feed, Stories, Reels, Marketplace and video feeds
- Instagram feed, Stories, Reels and Explore
- Messenger inbox and Stories
- Audience Network, Meta's network of partner apps and sites
Meta assigns each of your images to placements by aspect ratio, which is why we recommend supplying both a Square (1:1) and a Story (9:16) version of your creative. Square covers the feeds, 9:16 covers Stories and Reels. Every image you upload gets a one-click variant in the other size.
Google campaigns are separate and run on Search, Shopping, YouTube, Gmail and the Display network through Performance Max.
Other platforms
X (Twitter), TikTok and Snapchat integrations are coming soon. Until then, anything you launch through Agency AI runs on Meta or Google only.
How to preview your ads
Open Manage Ads and go to the Ads tab. Selecting an ad shows the creative and the copy exactly as it was submitted, alongside its status and performance.
You can also view any ad in Meta Ads Manager itself, where Meta offers a per-placement preview showing how the ad renders in a Facebook feed versus an Instagram Story and so on. That is the most accurate view of what a customer will actually see, because it accounts for cropping and text overlay at each placement.
Why dynamic ads have no preview
A dynamic catalog ad has no fixed creative to preview. Meta builds the carousel individually for each person from your product catalog, so there is no single version that exists ahead of time. Two people see different products in the same ad.
What you can check before it runs is the caption, the call to action, and the product set the ad is allowed to draw from. Everything else is decided at the moment it is served. Full explanation: Static vs dynamic ads.
Seeing your live ads on Facebook and Instagram
You will not reliably see your own ads by scrolling your own feed. Meta targets your chosen audience, and you are usually excluded from it or simply not selected.
To view what is live publicly, open your Facebook Page, go to the Page transparency section and choose Ad Library. Every active ad running from your Page is listed there. The Meta Ad Library is public, so you can also use it to look at what competitors are running.
Ad status and review
New ads go into Meta's review queue before they can be delivered. This usually takes a few hours. Nothing spends while an ad is in review, and status updates appear in Manage Ads.
If an ad comes back rejected, see Why your ad was rejected by Meta.