Facebook Ad Library Scraper

See exactly what ads any brand is running on Facebook and Instagram — right now.

• ✅ Search 8 million+ advertisers across Meta's public Ad Library by keyword, brand name, or topic
• ✅ Get the full ad creative: copy, headlines, CTAs, image URLs, and video URLs — not just metadata
• ✅ Filter by country, active/inactive status, or political ads only
• ✅ Download as Excel, CSV, or JSON — no Facebook login, no coding required
• ✅ Pay only for what you use: $0.002 per ad, no subscription
• ✅ Free $5 Apify credit on signup = ~2,500 ads to start with

Paying AdSpy $149/mo or BigSpy $99/mo just to peek at competitor creatives? This costs pennies per search and gives you the actual image URLs, video files, and ad copy — ready to drop into a swipe file or analytics pipeline.

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What you can do with it

1. Monitor what ads your competitors are running right now

Want to see every ad Nike, Shopify, or any other brand is currently running on Facebook and Instagram? Type the brand name, pick a country, and get back a table of every active ad with the full creative — headline, body text, call-to-action button, images, and videos.

To run this, fill in a short form on the Apify page — just three fields:

What you enter:

What	Example
Search	Nike or Shopify or any brand name
Country	US (or ALL for worldwide)
Status	Active (currently running ads only)
How many ads	100

Click Start. A minute or two later, the Actor has pulled every matching ad from Meta's Ad Library and dropped them into a clean table:

What you get back:

Advertiser	Headline	Body text (excerpt)	CTA	Format	Created	Image
Nike	Air Max Dn — Feel Unreal	Just Do It. The new Air Max Dn features...	Shop Now	Video	2026-03-22	view
Nike	Spring Collection 2026	Your next run starts here. Pegasus 42...	Learn More	Image	2026-04-01	view
…	…	…	…	…	…	…

Every row gives you the complete creative — the exact text, the exact image/video file URL, and the CTA button text. Download as Excel, CSV, or JSON, or pipe it into Google Sheets via Make or Zapier to track changes over time.

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2. Cheaper alternative to AdSpy, BigSpy, or PowerAdSpy

AdSpy charges $149/month. BigSpy Pro is $99/month. PowerAdSpy starts at $69/month. If you just need to pull ad creatives from Facebook's public library into a spreadsheet for competitive research or client reports — those tools are wildly overpriced for what you're doing.

This Actor gives you the same creative data (copy + images + videos + CTA + advertiser info) at $0.002 per ad. Same form, same output — just pay-per-use instead of a monthly subscription:

What you enter:

What	Example
Search	crm software or email marketing or any niche keyword
Country	ALL (worldwide)
Status	Active
How many ads	500

What you get back (500 ads across all advertisers running ads about "crm software"):

Advertiser	Headline	CTA	Format	Created
HubSpot	Free CRM for Growing Teams	Sign Up	Image	2026-04-10
Salesforce	#1 AI CRM — Try for Free	Learn More	Video	2026-04-05
Zoho CRM	Automate Your Sales Pipeline	Get Started	Image	2026-03-28
…	…	…	…	…

Cost for this run: about $1. One dollar for 500 competitor ad creatives with the exact copy, imagery, and CTAs they're using right now. A single month of AdSpy ($149) buys you 74,500 ads through this Actor instead.

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3. Build a swipe file of winning ads in your niche

Before you write your next Facebook ad, see what's already working. Search a keyword related to your product, pull 200-500 active ads, and you have an instant swipe file — real headlines, real body copy, real CTAs, real images that real brands are paying to run right now.

What you enter:

What	Example
Search	protein powder or yoga mat or accounting software
Country	US
Status	Active (only ads currently running — these are the ones that are working)
How many ads	200

What you get back:

Advertiser	Headline	Body text (first 80 chars)	CTA	Format
Optimum Nutrition	Gold Standard 100% Whey	24g protein per serving. Over 5 million...	Shop Now	Image
Transparent Labs	No Artificial Sweeteners. No BS.	We believe supplements should be...	Learn More	Video
…	…	…	…	…

Sort by advertiser to see who's running the most ads (they're spending the most — their creative is worth studying). Sort by format to separate video vs image ads. Copy the headlines and CTAs you like into your own creative brief.

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4. Track political and issue ads across countries

Meta's Ad Library includes a dedicated section for political and issue-based advertising. Journalists, researchers, NGOs, and policy analysts use it to track who's spending money on political messaging, in which countries, and with what creative. This Actor lets you pull that data at scale instead of clicking through the Ad Library UI one page at a time.

What you enter:

What	Example
Search	climate or immigration or a candidate's name
Country	GB (or ALL for worldwide)
Ad type	Political and issue ads
Status	All (active + inactive to see full history)
How many ads	500

What you get back:

Advertiser	Headline	Body text (excerpt)	Country	Created	Status
Greenpeace UK	Stop Deep Sea Mining	The ocean floor is not a resource...	GB	2026-03-15	Active
Conservative Party	Our Plan for Growth	Building homes, cutting taxes...	GB	2026-02-28	Inactive
…	…	…	…	…	…

This is the same data journalists at The Guardian or ProPublica use for ad transparency investigations — just pulled into a spreadsheet instead of browsed manually.

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5. Use it from ChatGPT, Claude, or no-code automation

Ask your AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor) a question like "show me every active Facebook ad from Shopify in the US right now" — it runs this Actor and returns real, current data back into the conversation. Also works as a "Run Actor" step in Make, n8n, and Zapier.

Connect the Apify MCP server once in your assistant's settings (configuration in the developer section below), and from then on you just ask questions in plain English inside the chat:

What you enter (a plain-English question, not a form):

What	Example
Search	Shopify
Country	US
How many ads	50

The assistant translates your question into the right Actor input, runs the search, and shows the results in the conversation:

What your assistant gets back:

Advertiser	Headline	CTA	Format	Created
Shopify	Start Your Free Trial	Sign Up	Video	2026-04-12
Shopify	From Side Hustle to Full-Time	Learn More	Image	2026-04-08
…	…	…	…	…

You can follow up naturally — "which ones are video ads?" or "sort by date" or "show me just the headlines and CTAs" — and your assistant will filter or reformat the data without having to re-run the search.

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How to use (no code required)

1. Click "Try for Free" at the top of this page
2. Type a search — any brand name, product, or topic (e.g. Nike, crm software, climate change)
3. Pick a country (default US) or set to ALL for worldwide
4. Choose whether you want active ads only, inactive (ended) ads, or both
5. Click Start — results appear in the Dataset tab in a minute or two, ready to download as Excel, CSV, or JSON

That's the whole workflow — type a brand name, wait, download. If you've ever searched Meta's Ad Library website manually, you already know what this returns. The difference is that instead of scrolling through results one by one in a browser, you get them all in a structured spreadsheet — with the actual image and video file URLs included so you can save the creatives directly.

No Facebook login needed. This Actor reads from Meta's public transparency library. Your Facebook account stays completely untouched and safe.

The $5 free Apify credit you get on signup covers ~2,500 ads — enough to pull every active ad from several major competitors before spending anything.

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What you get back

Each ad comes back as one row in a table. Here's everything you'll see in that row:

• Advertiser name and a link to their Facebook page
• Ad headline and body text — the exact copy running in the ad
• Call-to-action button text (Shop Now, Learn More, Sign Up, etc.)
• Ad format — whether it's an image ad, video ad, or carousel
• Image URLs — direct links to the ad's images (downloadable)
• Video URLs — direct links to the ad's video files (downloadable)
• Link URL — where the ad sends people when they click
• Created date — when the ad started running
• Active status — whether it's still running or has ended
• Advertiser profile picture URL — the page's avatar image

Each result set comes back as a table you can download as Excel, CSV, or JSON, or pipe into Google Sheets, Notion, Airtable, or any other tool through Zapier or Make.

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Data sources

All data comes from Meta's public Ad Library — the same transparency database available at facebook.com/ads/library. Meta publishes this data for all ads running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network. Every run is a live fetch at run time, so results reflect what Meta is showing at that moment.

Coverage is global — Meta's Ad Library contains ads from 8 million+ active advertisers worldwide, running across a platform that reaches 2.4 billion users. You can search by any country or set to ALL for worldwide results.

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Pricing

Pay per ad. No subscription.

Billing is simple: you pay a small fee to kick off a run, plus a per-ad fee for each ad creative the Actor returns. That's it — no tiers, no seat fees, no monthly minimums.

What triggers a charge	Cost
Actor start (each run)	$0.005
Each ad returned	$0.002

To give you a feel for what this looks like in actual dollars for real-world runs:

Real-world cost examples:

Scenario	Ads	Total cost
Quick brand check: one competitor's active ads	50	$0.105
Niche swipe file: keyword across all advertisers	200	$0.405
Full competitive audit: 5 competitors × 200 ads	1,000	$2.005
Industry-wide research: all active ads for a keyword	5,000	$10.005

The cost scales linearly — double the ads, double the cost. No tier thresholds, no surprise jumps.

$5 free Apify credit = ~2,500 ads — enough to audit your entire competitive landscape before paying anything.

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How this compares to the alternatives:

Here's what you'd pay with other common ad intelligence tools for similar creative data:

Tool	Price	What you get	What you don't get
AdSpy	$149/mo (single tier)	Facebook + Instagram ad search, 100K views/month	Monthly subscription, no API, no automation integration
SEMrush Advertising	$99–$220/mo	Ad intelligence + keyword research bundle	Subscription, not focused on Meta creative assets
BigSpy Pro	$99/mo	Multi-platform ad search (FB, Google, TikTok)	Monthly subscription, UI-only export
PowerAdSpy	$69–$399/mo (6 tiers)	Facebook + Instagram ad monitoring	Subscription, tiered feature gates
Adbeat	$249–$399/mo	Display ad intelligence	Expensive, focused on display not social
Meta Ad Library API (official)	Free, ~200 calls/hour	Direct access to Meta data	No creative file URLs, no bulk export, harsh rate limits, no historical data for non-political ads
This Actor	$0.005/run + $0.002/ad	Full creative (copy + images + videos + CTA), pay-per-use, MCP + LangChain native	—

No annual contract. No subscription. No seat minimum. $5 free credit covers ~2,500 ads — start there.

If you run zero searches in a month, you owe zero dollars. None of the subscription tools above work that way.

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Connect to your tools

Use this Actor from any of the major no-code and automation tools. You don't need to write or edit any code — each tool has a built-in Apify connector that handles the wiring for you:

Platform	How to connect
Make.com	Search "Apify" → "Run Actor" → use Actor ID lentic_clockss/facebook-ad-library-scraper
n8n	Add Apify node → "Run Actor" → same Actor ID
Zapier	Apify integration → "Run Actor" trigger
ChatGPT / Claude / Cursor	Connect via Apify's MCP endpoint — your AI assistant calls this Actor directly inside a chat
LangChain, Python, custom code	Via Apify SDK or direct API call

The three most common setups in practice:

• With ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor: connect once via MCP (configuration in the developer section below), then just ask questions in plain English — "show me all active Nike ads in the US right now" — and your assistant runs this Actor and returns the results right in the conversation.
• With Make or Zapier: set up a scheduled automation (for example: "every Monday, pull all active ads from my top 5 competitors, write new ads to Google Sheets, alert me on Slack if anyone launched a video ad"). Configure once, it runs forever.
• With n8n: same idea as Make and Zapier, with a self-hosted option if you need your data to stay on your own infrastructure.

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When to use something else

This Actor is built specifically for pulling ad creatives from Meta's public Ad Library. For anything outside that scope, here are the tools that fit better:

If you need…	Use this instead
Google Ads / YouTube ad creatives	A dedicated Google Ads transparency tool or the Google Ads Transparency Center
TikTok ad creatives	TikTok's Creative Center or a dedicated TikTok ad scraper
Ad performance metrics (impressions, CTR, spend)	Your own Meta Ads Manager — the Ad Library shows creatives only, not performance data
Historical ad data older than Meta retains	AdSpy or BigSpy maintain their own historical archives
Local business data (restaurants, shops)	Google Maps Scraper
Scraping arbitrary websites behind anti-bot protection	Stealth Web Scraper

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FAQ

Q: Do I need a Facebook account to use this? A: No. This Actor reads from Meta's public Ad Library, which is accessible without any login. Your Facebook account stays completely untouched.

Q: How fresh is the data? A: Every run is a live fetch at run time. Results reflect what Meta's Ad Library is showing at that moment — if a brand launched a new ad an hour ago, you'll see it.

Q: Can I get 5,000+ ads in one run? A: Yes. The maxResults field goes up to 5,000 per run. For very large pulls, allow a few extra minutes of runtime.

Q: Does this include ad spend data? A: For political and issue ads, Meta discloses estimated spend ranges. For commercial ads, Meta does not publish spend data in the Ad Library — no tool can extract it because it's not there.

Q: Can I search by advertiser page instead of keyword? A: Yes. Type the exact page name (e.g. "Nike") as your search query and set the country — the Actor returns all ads from that page.

Q: Why not just use Meta's official Ad Library API? A: Meta's official API is free but severely limited: ~200 calls/hour rate limit, no direct URLs to creative assets (images/videos), no bulk export capability, and no historical data for non-political ads. This Actor solves all four limitations by scraping the Ad Library UI directly, returning full creative file URLs, and supporting exports up to 5,000 ads per run.

Q: Can I track competitors on a schedule? A: Yes. Use Apify's built-in scheduler or trigger from Make/Zapier/n8n. Popular setup: weekly Monday-morning pull for your top 5 competitors, diff against last week's file, alert on Slack when a new ad is detected.

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Related Actors

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• LinkedIn Jobs Scraper — scrape LinkedIn job postings at scale, no login required
• US Real Estate Scraper — pull property listings from Zillow, Redfin, Zumper, and more
• Stealth Web Scraper — scrape Cloudflare-protected and anti-bot sites

→ Browse all Actors: apify.com/lentic_clockss

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Also Available

• Direct API: https://opendata.best/api/v1/data — use with any HTTP client and your API key
• Postman Collection: Fork and test — pre-built requests with example responses
• GitHub: Collection source files — import JSON into any API client