Adnova Review: Facebook Ad Research Tool (Lifetime Deal)

What Is Adnova and Who Is It For?

Adnova is an ad research and collaboration tool built specifically for Facebook and Instagram advertisers. At its core, the platform breaks down into three main areas: Inspirations for discovering and saving ads, Detective for deep competitor analysis, and Drive for managing your own creative assets with your team.

While it works perfectly fine for solo entrepreneurs running one or two businesses, the real power shows up when you're managing ads for multiple clients. Adnova uses a workspace model where each client gets their own dedicated space complete with custom logos, team member access, tags, and notification settings. If you're running an agency, this kind of organization is a game-changer compared to scattered spreadsheets and Slack threads.

Pricing and Lifetime Deal Tiers

Adnova is available as a lifetime deal on AppSumo across three tiers. Tier one starts at $59 and gives you five workspaces and 25 GB of storage — a solid starting point for freelancers or small operators. Tier two bumps you up to 20 workspaces and 100 GB of storage, while tier three unlocks unlimited workspaces, unlimited users, and 500 GB of storage for larger agencies.

One standout feature worth noting: tiers two and three include full white-label capabilities. You can slap your own custom domain, branding, and color scheme on the entire platform, which is a big deal if you want to present a polished, branded experience to your clients. If you're serious about scaling an ad agency, tier three is the sweet spot.

Inspirations: Ad Discovery with a Caveat

The Inspirations section is Adnova's built-in ad search tool, and honestly, it's the weakest part of the platform. Rather than pulling directly from Facebook's Ad Library in real time, Adnova appears to scrape and cache ad data. The result is that searches can feel incomplete or irrelevant — searching for "plumber," for example, returned pages of unrelated ads from a single brand instead of actual plumber advertisements.

The good news is that Adnova more than compensates for this with its Chrome extension. Once installed, the extension adds a "Save to Adnova" button directly inside Meta's Ad Library, which is free and far more comprehensive. You search the Ad Library as you normally would, find ads that catch your eye, and save them straight to a client board inside Adnova with one click. This workflow — using Meta's Ad Library for discovery and Adnova for organization — is genuinely excellent and sidesteps the limitations of the built-in search entirely.

Saving Ads and Collaborating on Boards

Once you've saved ads to a board, the collaboration features really start to shine. Clicking on any saved ad pulls up the full details: ad copy, landing page URL, the creative image or video, and metadata like the ad ID and which platforms it's running on. Everything is preserved permanently, so even if the original ad gets taken down, your saved copy stays intact.

The annotation and commenting system is where this becomes genuinely useful for teams. You can leave comments directly on saved ads, tag them for organization, mark favorites, and even generate shareable links with optional password protection and expiration dates. Instead of bouncing between email threads and Slack channels trying to discuss ad inspiration with clients or designers, everything lives in one organized place. For agencies in the early planning stages of a campaign — pulling together reference ads, discussing styles, and getting client buy-in — this workflow is hard to beat.

Detective: Competitor Ad Intelligence

Detective is the standout feature of Adnova and the reason most people will want this tool. Pick any brand — the demo used Tony Robbins — and you get a deep breakdown of their entire Facebook advertising strategy. The dashboard shows total creatives (Tony Robbins had 2,609), how many are currently active (just 184), and the split between formats: in this case, 83% video and only 16% images.

But it goes much deeper than surface-level stats. You get a word cloud showing the most common terms in their ad copy, which is a goldmine for understanding what messaging resonates in a niche. There's a breakdown of landing pages so you can literally click through and reverse-engineer a competitor's entire sales funnel. You can see which call-to-action buttons they favor — learn more, sign up, get offer, shop now — and how heavily each one is used. For data-driven advertisers, this level of competitor intelligence is incredibly valuable and would take hours to compile manually.

You can add brands to Detective directly from the Inspirations section or skip that entirely and paste in an Ad Library URL. Either way, once a brand is loaded, you have a comprehensive creative strategy report at your fingertips.

Drive: Creative Asset Management and Feedback

The Drive section rounds out the platform with a dedicated space for managing your own ad creatives. Think of it as a lightweight project management layer built specifically for ad creative review. You create boards for each campaign, upload your images or videos, and then use the same annotation and commenting tools from the Inspirations section to collaborate with designers, copywriters, and clients.

The version control aspect is particularly practical. As your design team makes revisions based on feedback, they upload new versions to the same board, so you can track the progression of an ad from initial concept to final approved creative. It's not trying to replace Figma or a full project management suite — it's focused specifically on that feedback loop between ad creation and approval, and it does that job well. Storage ranges from 25 GB on tier one to 500 GB on tier three, so even heavy users should have plenty of room.

Final Verdict: Is Adnova Worth It?

Adnova earns a solid 8.1 out of 10. The built-in Inspirations search is the one weak spot — it doesn't match the depth or relevance of Meta's own Ad Library. But the Chrome extension integration completely solves that problem, and the combination of ad saving, competitor intelligence via Detective, and creative collaboration through Drive makes this a well-rounded tool for anyone running Facebook or Instagram ads.

For agencies, the workspace model, white-labeling options, and team collaboration features make Adnova a no-brainer at lifetime deal pricing. Solo entrepreneurs can get started with tier one at just $59 and still extract enormous value from the Detective feature alone. If you're spending money on Facebook or Instagram ads and not currently using a dedicated research tool, Adnova is well worth a look.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.