The Meta Ad Library serves as a public archive of all ads that run on Facebook and its associated platforms. If you want to scrape data from the Ad Library, Meta makes it possible through the Marketing API and the Ad Library API, but only with approved access and strict limits. Since ads are dynamically loaded through JavaScript, often after user interaction or scrolling, they're hard to detect with generic HTML scrapers.
With Apify Facebook Ads Scraper, you don’t need to build a Meta app, request approvals, or juggle tokens just to research ads. Proxies, CAPTCHAs, and human behaviour emulation are handled for you. The scraper can also be connected with almost any cloud service or web app, including Make, Zapier, Asana, Google Drive, and more. Plus, it’s easy to use - simply copy URLs, run the scraper, and download results. Here’s how to do it.
Step-by-step guide to scraping Facebook Ads
Step 1. Go to Facebook Ads Scraper
Find Facebook Ads Scraper on Apify Store and try it for free. Apify provides $5 in free usage credits every month on the Apify Free plan, meaning you can scrape up to 1,000 ads for free. If you don’t have an Apify account yet, it’s easy to sign up with your GitHub or email account from any provider. You’ll enter Apify Console, a workspace to run or build web scraping tools for any website, including Facebook.
Step 2. Configure the scraper
Decide which Facebook Page you want to extract advertising data from. You can use either Facebook Page URLs or Facebook Ads URLs as your starting point.
Scraping ads from a Facebook page
Head over to facebook.com, find the Facebook page of the brand or public figure whose ads you’re interested in, and copy their page URL(s). This method is the easiest since you don’t have to search for the ads themselves; a page is all you need. For our example, we’ll use Polaroid’s Facebook Page.
Scraping ads from the Ads Library
Alternatively, head over directly to the Ads Library. Facebook ads are publicly available, so you don’t need any special access to see the ads running presently, for any brand. This method works well if you need to narrow down your search: You get to pick the country, type, and filter the results by keyword before scraping them.
Pick the location, ad type, and brand you’re interested in:
Once done, copy the Ads Library URL.
Now paste the Facebook page/Library Ads URL into the scraper. You can also set up how many ads you want to scrape or decide on the activity status of the scraped ads.
Step 3. Run the scraper by clicking Start
Once you're ready, click the Start button to begin the data extraction from Facebook. The status will change to Running, and you’ll need to wait until the process is complete. It shouldn’t take long for the status to change to Succeeded.
Step 4. Download your Facebook Ads data
You can download Facebook data in several formats, including JSON, CSV, and Excel. You can customize your export and exclude fields you’re not interested in, reducing the information noise.
Now you can easily save the data in a format of your choosing. In this example, we chose JSON as our export output format.
That’s it, you’re done. Now that you know how it works, you can give it a go yourself - choose your brand, copy the URLs, and execute your run with a click of a button.
Using data from Facebook Ads
Data analysis of the information in Facebook Ad Library can give you interesting details about tactics, messaging, and even spending on social media campaigns - in marketing, journalism, research, or politics. With Facebook Ads Scraper, you can:
- Get details about each ad: activity timeframe, advertiser, location, and more.
- Search for ads from a particular advertiser to see how top advertisers are reaching your audience.
- Use any keyword you want, or even target a specific country or type of ad.
You can use this data to perform competition analysis and enhance your social media reporting.
Need more Facebook scraping tools?
If you're trying to get specific Facebook data, such as comments or page reviews, Apify Store offers many ready-to-use Actors specifically designed to scrape Facebook. They are all free to try out:
