Track what your competitors advertise on Facebook and Instagram. Scrapes Meta's public Ad Library into clean JSON — ad copy, every creative image and video, CTA, destination URL and run dates. No Meta API token, no login. Scheduled runs bill only what is new or changed.
Fix: a run died on a refusal it should have retried. Meta declines a
request it dislikes with HTTP 200 and the reason in the body. The actor read
the missing data field, called it schema_changed — a category nothing
retries — and failed the whole run. It is now read as what it is: the refusal
is parsed out of every shape Meta uses for it (top level, nested, and inside
the GraphQL errors array), and an unrecognised one rotates the proxy session
and retries instead of ending the run. A body with no refusal in it at all is
still schema_changed, and now names the keys that did arrive.
Fix: the self-repair for a rotated query id had never worked. Two faults,
both silent. The re-read of the Ad Library shell was sent without the browser
navigation headers, so Meta answered HTTP 400 every time. And the bundle hunt
gave up after four candidates when the operation lives in the fifth — the id
is reached 7.4 MB in, so the cap could not have found it on any run. The
re-read now sends the same headers as the bootstrap, and the hunt is bounded
by a byte budget instead of a candidate count.
A resolved query id now outlives the run that paid for it. It is written
to the meta-ad-docid key-value store, so when Meta rotates, the first run
to notice pays for the bundle download once and every later run starts on the
right id for free. Previously each run would have re-paid.
A stale query id is told apart from a block. Meta names it ("Query with
id … does not exist"), which asks for a bundle re-read; rotating proxies
against it would never have helped.
Deployment is now scripts/push.mjs, committed alongside the actor instead
of improvised, and the live smoke test exercises the self-repair path — the
part that only runs after a failure, and so rots unseen.
1.0.1 — 2026-08-27
Fix: Meta now serves its anti-bot challenge page with HTTP 403 (it used
to be HTTP 200). The bootstrap treated that status as a hard block and every
run failed as blocked. The challenge inside the body is still solvable —
the session handshake now recognises it, solves it, and proceeds. Verified
end to end against the live Ad Library.
1.0.0 — 2026-08-27
First release.
Reads the public Meta Ad Library through the same GraphQL call the website
makes. No login, no Meta API token, no headless browser.
Resumable pagination. A run cut short by a crash, a dead proxy or an Apify
platform migration continues from the exact page it reached, and does not
re-bill what it already delivered.
Change tracking. Scheduled runs report ads that are new, changed, stopped,
or spreading into more ad sets (isScaling). Only new and changed ads are billed.
Creatives from everywhere Meta hides them — top level, carousel cards and
extras. Measured at 9.7× more media than reading snapshot.images alone.
13 filters applied before billing, so a filtered ad is never charged.
advertiserDomains finds a brand by website instead of by name, which
skips identically-named Pages.
Explicit runStatus (COMPLETE / PARTIAL / FAILED) with the reason,
so a truncated run can never pass for a full one.
Webhook delivery of the change set, with a run-status block.
Input validation that refuses unknown fields before spending anything.
persistMedia downloads creatives into the key-value store, because
Meta's CDN links expire within days.
Self-healing against Meta rotating its internal query id.
