Facebook Ads Transcript Scraper — Ad Library Video & Image Ads
Pricing
from $10.00 / 1,000 ad creative transcripts
Facebook & Instagram Ad Library ads transcribed in bulk: video transcripts with the first-3s hook, plus image-ad text. Search by keyword or advertiser — no ad IDs needed — or paste ad links or chain any scraper. No start fee; expired links, text-free images and music-only ads are never charged.
A value the two dropdowns do not recognise now stops the search instead of quietly running it on the default filter.
Ad format to search for (mediaType) and Ads to include (activeStatus) used to answer an unrecognised value — a typo, a synonym such as "paused" or "gif" — by searching on the default (video / active) and mentioning it in a free row. That still delivered, and charged for, ads matching a filter you had not chosen. Now the search does not run at all: you get one free row naming the value you sent and the options that field accepts, and nothing is charged. Leaving the field out, or sending null, still means the default exactly as before, silently. Pasted ad links, chained dataset runs and direct video URLs are unaffected — neither dropdown applies to them.
Documentation only — nothing changes in your rows, prices, charges or status line.
The example screenshots on this page now load from Apify's own storage, and the references that used to point off Apify are plain text now. The free n8n workflow templates are unchanged and still listed on our profile website. Your dataset, your charges and the status line are unchanged.
Completes the internal cost-accounting change from the previous build — nothing changes in your rows, prices, charges or status line.
A storage fix on our side: runs started from any account now contribute to our internal cost accounting the same way our own runs do. Your dataset, your charges and the status line are unchanged.
Our cost records are now complete for every run — nothing changes in your rows, prices, charges or status line.
Runs started from any account now contribute to our internal cost accounting the same way our own runs do. Your dataset, your charges and the status line are unchanged.
Internal accounting fix — nothing changes in your rows, prices, charges or status line.
A small correction to how our own cost records count very short clips. Your dataset, your charges and the status line are unchanged.
Internal cost accounting only — nothing changes in your rows, prices, charges or status line.
Runs started from our own account now record the processing they used, so our cost reports are measured instead of estimated. Nothing is added to your run or its storage, and your dataset, your charges and the status line are unchanged.
Start with the default form and get a real 3-ad sample instead of a placeholder row.
Clicking Start with nothing set used to return one free "demo" row and no transcript. It now runs a small real sample — the US Ad Library searched for currently running video ads matching "fitness app", up to 3 ads — transcribed and charged like any run, so the first thing you see is the actual output. The status line says it was the sample and how to run your own search. If the Ad Library cannot be searched at that moment, you still get one uncharged row explaining it, never an empty result.
Text-heavy image ads are now read in full, and watchlist timestamps match exactly between your list and your rows.
firstSeenAt your list remembers is now byte-for-byte the value on the row you received. Previously the two could differ by a few milliseconds, so a row from the first run and the same ad on a later run did not read as the same instant. Existing lists keep working; nothing is re-charged.Watchlists: re-run the same competitors on a schedule and pay only for the ads that are new.
Until now every run was a one-off. Ask for the same advertiser tomorrow and you got — and paid for — the same ads again. Two new fields change that:
watchlistId) — give the run a name such as acme-competitors and the actor remembers every ad it has answered under that name, in a key-value store in your own Apify account (fb-ads-watch-<name>, yours to inspect or clear). Every row now says whether the ad is new to that list (isNew) and when it was first seen (firstSeenAt).newAdsOnly) — with a watchlist set, ads already on the list are skipped before anything is downloaded: not fetched, not transcribed, not charged. The run's status line and its OUTPUT summary say how many were new, how many were skipped, and how many the list holds now.Only an ad the actor actually answered goes on the list — a delivered transcript, image text or on-screen text, or a final free verdict such as no speech. An ad it could not answer (a failed download, a link it could not resolve, an ad your cost cap left out) is not remembered, so the next run tries it again. The list is written the moment a row lands in your dataset and before its charge posts, so an interrupted run can never forget an ad you paid for.
Two safety rules: New ads only without a watchlist name does not run at all (the actor cannot tell a new ad from one you already paid for), and a watchlist the run cannot open stops the run before any spend. Both ship as one free, clearly-labelled row.
Without a watchlist name nothing changes: the two new columns read null, and every input mode, price and charging rule is exactly as before.
The README was rewritten at the same time: what you get and the price up front, a scheduling recipe for the watchlist, a comparison with the other ways to get this data, and the one-click MCP link.
The step that reads text off a creative moves to our provider's current engine.
The engine behind image-ad text extraction — and behind on-screen text on silent video ads, if you have that turned on — is being retired by the provider this month, with runs quietly redirected to its replacement two weeks from now. This build makes that move explicitly instead: charged output should never ride a silent switch.
Both engines were run side by side on the same real Facebook and Instagram creatives before this shipped. The same text comes back, and the rule that matters most is unchanged: a creative with no readable ad copy is still a free, honest miss and is never charged — verified on blank frames, product photos with no copy, and b-roll whose only visible text is a logo. On a text-heavy creative the new engine fills in the headline field a little more often. Nothing about what this actor charges changed.
Completes 1.0.53: videos between two and twenty minutes are now covered too.
1.0.53 gave each creative a time budget earned by its own length. On the first live run of that build the very long ads (twenty-one and sixty-three minutes) transcribed correctly for the first time — but ads in the middle of the range, roughly two to twenty minutes, came back as failed_download instead. The new budget was being computed as a fraction of a millisecond, which the underlying process launcher refuses outright; only durations between the fixed lower and upper bounds could produce a fraction, so the very short and the very long ads were unaffected.
Two things changed:
No row was ever charged for either failure. Ads under two minutes behaved correctly throughout.
Long video ads now transcribe. Until this build, an ad much past ten minutes came back as a failure — and the store page's "any video length" promise was not true.
On a 20-ad run of real Facebook video ads, five came back as failed_processing. Every one of them was a long-form creative: 12, 13, 14, 15 and 63 minutes. Nothing under five minutes ever failed. Short ads were never affected, and nothing was ever charged for a failed row — but a quarter of that run was lost, and the rows said nothing a buyer could act on.
The cause was a fixed ceiling on how long this actor would spend pulling the audio out of one creative. It was set once, for short ads, and never grew with the video. A 63-minute ad needs several minutes of that work; it was being stopped after two and reported as a broken file.
What changed
no_audio row (and, with on-screen text extraction turned on, as an on-screen-text result instead) — that verdict is now reached from the file's own stream list rather than after a failed attempt, so it is faster and cannot be confused with anything else.failed_processing row marked retryable, and the row tells you what to do: re-run it, and give the run more memory — memory is also CPU on this platform, and CPU is what a long video needs.Verified on the exact ads that were lost, including the 63-minute one: full transcript, 1,765 timed segments.
The two dropdown fields now accept null as well, so a template can null every field it does not set.
1.0.51 made an unset field sendable as null — but it could not cover the two dropdowns, Ad format to search for (mediaType) and Ads to include (activeStatus). A dropdown is validated against its list of allowed values, and null is not on any list, so a template that nulled all its unset fields still had its run refused before it started.
Both dropdowns keep their options and titles in the input form, and both now accept null as "use the default" — video and active respectively. {"searchQueries": ["fitness app"], "mediaType": null, "activeStatus": null, "maxAds": null} now runs exactly like {"searchQueries": ["fitness app"]}. With this, every optional field on this actor takes null.
One consequence worth stating plainly: a value that is not on a dropdown's list is no longer refused before the run. It is caught by the run instead, which uses the documented default and returns a free row telling you which value it did not recognise and what it used — the same way this actor has always answered a country code or a link it could not read. Nothing about what this actor delivers, or charges, changed.
A field you left unset can now be sent as null — the run starts and uses the default.
If you call this actor from a template — n8n, an agent framework, a chained workflow — the tool usually fills in every field it knows about, and writes null into the ones you left blank. Until this build the platform refused those runs before they started, with an error like Field input.maxAds must be integer. Nothing ran, nothing was charged, and the fix was non-obvious: you had to delete the key entirely rather than leave it empty.
Optional fields now accept an explicit null and read it as "use the default" — identical to leaving the field out. {"searchQueries": ["fitness app"], "country": null, "maxAds": null} runs exactly like {"searchQueries": ["fitness app"]}, searching the US with the standard 1,000-ad cap. A null never counts as a value: it will not read as an empty keyword list, and it will not turn on an option that defaults off. (The two dropdown fields still needed null support at this point — 1.0.52 finishes the job.)
Nothing about what this actor delivers, or charges, changed.
The opening hook is never blank again, and it now tells you when it starts.
hook3s is the first 3 seconds of speech in an ad. Plenty of Facebook creatives — brand films, long title cards, anything that opens on music or a logo sting — say nothing at all in those 3 seconds, and until now those ads came back with the hook column empty: exactly what you would see if the actor had simply failed to get the line. On a charged row, that was our headline field arriving blank.
hook3s now carries the first 3 seconds of speech from wherever speech actually begins — the real opening line.hookStartSeconds column. The second that line starts, so a late hook can never be mistaken for one that opened the ad. 0 means the ad opens speaking. Sort by it to see which competitors make you wait for the pitch.null), so "this ad opens silent" and "we lost the line" can no longer look identical in your spreadsheet.Nothing about what this actor delivers otherwise, or charges, changed.
A safety belt on what this actor may charge you for. Most of what a run writes is deliberately not charged: the sample row a blank run returns, the guidance row when an input field is missing or misspelled, a keyword search that found nothing, an ad whose creative link had expired, a silent ad, a download that failed, and every ad left over at your maximum cost. Those rows are the product — they are how you can see what happened to each ad you asked for. This build makes that promise structural: the run now reads which billing model it is on before it writes anything, and if this actor were ever moved to a model that charges for each result row, those free rows would be reported in the run summary and status line instead of being written as rows you would be charged for. On such a model a delivered result also can no longer be charged twice, and a run resumed after an interruption cannot re-charge for results the first attempt already billed. Nothing charged today changes: on the current pricing every one of those rows still ships exactly as before, still uncharged.
A run now spends the cost cap you set. When several ads were being processed at once, an ad that turned out to carry no speech released the cost it had reserved — but by then the ads still waiting had already been answered with skipped_budget rows, so that released budget had nobody left to spend it and a run could finish having delivered nothing while charging nothing. Ads now wait for budget that is still in play instead of being skipped past it, so a run delivers as many transcripts as your maximum cost allows. Some ads failed to download with a network error no re-run could fix — the video address the run reached for was not reachable from it, and every retry reached for the same one. Video and image downloads now take a route the run can always reach, so those ads come back as transcripts instead of "please re-run" rows. Ads left over at the cap are now marked retryable: true alongside their skipped_budget status, and the run summary names your maximum cost in dollars instead of just mentioning it. Prices and what is charged are unchanged.
The long-video surcharge is now spelled out in the input form. The Max ads to process field's description now says what the Pricing tab and this page already did: the first 3 minutes of every video are included in the transcript price, and each started minute beyond that is charged as a "Long-video minute (surcharge)" at $0.005 — only on delivered transcripts, never on image ads or on-screen text. The output table on this page now says the same next to its "any length" promise. Prices and what is charged are unchanged.
Every ad you asked for gets a row — including the ones your cost cap could not cover. When a run reaches its maximum cost, each ad left over now ships as a free skipped_budget row with everything already known about it (advertiser, ad text, CTA, archive id), so the dataset always holds one row per ad and the run summary's count matches what you can see. Silent ads now tell you how to read them: a no_audio row and the run's status line both point at the "Read on-screen text on silent ads" option — many music-only ads carry their whole message on screen. Dynamic product ads ship real copy: ads Facebook serves as a {{product.name}} template now deliver the wording of the creative variant that was actually transcribed; in the rare case no variant copy exists, the row says so with adTextIsTemplate: true instead of looking broken. Prices and what is charged are unchanged.
Search for ads by keyword or advertiser — no ad IDs needed. Put something like fitness app, or a competitor's page name, into the new Search keywords field, pick a country, and the ads running there come back already transcribed. Nothing else is required: no links to paste, no other scraper to run first. Each keyword has its own cap on how many ads it may return, you can include stopped ads or image formats, and every delivered row says which keyword found it. A keyword that matches nothing, or a search Facebook declines that minute, ships as a free row saying exactly that — searching itself is never charged, and the price per delivered result is unchanged. Ad Library links, video URLs and dataset chaining all work exactly as before.
An ad with no real speech is never charged. A transcript that is only the speech engine's own filler — including the subtitle-credit lines it sometimes invents on music-only ads — one whose timing does not fit the audio, or one in a language that cannot belong to the ad's own declared country, now ships as a free no-speech row. Genuinely spoken ads, in any language, are delivered and charged exactly as before.
Nothing about what this actor delivers or charges changed.
This page's wording refreshed and a suite link carries a sibling's updated store title. Nothing about what this actor delivers or charges changed.
Clearer release notes — this page's notes now read more plainly. Nothing about what this actor delivers or charges changed.
Suite links now point at the full live shelf — every actor named in this README is a live store link. Nothing about what this actor delivers or charges changed.
skipped_budget row telling you to raise "Maximum cost per run" and re-run for it — and the rest of the run stops buying media it can no longer bill.asr_unavailable row, marked retryable, saying the problem is on our side and nothing was charged. A re-run picks those ads up exactly as before, the run still stops immediately without buying anything further, and the status line reads as it always has.statusReason, in plain language. The same ads are recognised as before, and they are still never charged.onScreenText field (headline, body, CTA, and the full visible text) instead of an empty row. It is off by default, so nothing changes unless you ask for it. A delivered on-screen extraction is charged exactly like a video transcript — same price, and never a long-video surcharge — and a silent ad with no readable text on screen is still free, as no_onscreen_text. The advertiser name on these rows always comes from the ad's own metadata, never from reading the picture.creatives[].url, src, mediaUrl or photos[].url got a free no_creative_found row saying its creative was "a profile picture or preview thumbnail". Those creatives now deliver. Profile pictures and preview thumbnails are still never treated as the ad.video_too_large / image_too_large row."videoUrls": [] (or an empty Ad Library links list) used to look identical to a blank run and came back with the free demo row, as if the empty list had worked. It now returns one free row naming the field to fill in. A genuinely blank run still returns the demo row exactly as before.imageText field, plus the ad's imageUrl. A delivered image extraction is charged exactly like a video transcript: same price, and never a long-video surcharge. Honesty contract unchanged — an image with no readable text (a plain photo) ships as a free ocr_no_text_found row, an expired image link as a free image_expired row, and a temporary reading problem as a free row that says to re-run. Prefer the previous behaviour? Set the new "Extract image-ad text" option off (includeImageText: false) and image ads pass through free with their metadata, exactly as before.adUrls used to look exactly like a blank run and came back with the free demo row — as if the typo had worked. Such a run now returns one free row that names the field it could not recognise, names the field to use instead (adLibraryUrls, with the shape to paste), and mentions the chaining fields. Nothing is charged, and a genuinely blank run still returns the demo row exactly as before.unavailable_expired with the decoded expiry time — no download is attempted for a link that can only fail. Links without a readable stamp are fetched as before.demo and explains that no input was provided, instead of reading like an ordinary image-ad result from an advertiser called "Demo Advertiser". It is still free, and the same is now true when the input form's example row is submitted unchanged.no_audio row, and a file the actor genuinely cannot process now gets its own free failed_processing row instead of being reported as music-only. Neither is charged.charged flag and the per-row chargeEvents ledger now read the run's live pricing, so they always match what you were actually charged.?id= number, or bare numbers inside chained rows — are no longer mistaken for Ad Library ads; they get clear guidance or keep their normal deep-scan behaviour.facebook.com/ads/library/?id=…, or a bare ad ID) and the actor finds the ad's video for you. Ad Library links pasted into Ad video URLs or Dataset items are picked up automatically too, instead of returning a "use a video URL" note.unavailable_removed row, and a temporary block from Facebook ships as a free resolve_blocked row telling you to re-run — never a wrong "this ad is gone" answer.datasetItems now ships as an uncharged input_error row with guidance, the run SUCCEEDS, and any valid URLs in the same batch are still transcribed (previously one bad URL failed the run).ERRORS record.inputModeMix (videoUrls / datasetItems / datasetId / invalidInputs / demo) for input-mode telemetry.Initial public release.
videoUrls, datasetId (chain a scraper run), datasetItems (paste rows) — deep-scan works with any ad-library scraper's output shape.language field on every row.