Meta Ad Library Scraper: Spy on Any Brand’s Facebook & Instagram Ads

Every active ad a brand runs on Facebook and Instagram is public. Meta's Ad Library exposes the copy, the creative, the platforms, and the dates for anyone to see - but the UI is painful to work with and the official API is gated behind token approval. A Meta Ad Library scraper turns that public data into clean JSON you can actually analyze.

The short answer

To scrape a brand's live ads, don't fight the Ad Library UI or wait on Meta's API approval. Send the brand (or page ID) to ArrowCrawl's /api/v1/meta-ads endpoint and get back every active ad - ad copy, image and video creatives, first-seen dates, and which platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network) it runs on. No Meta token, no login, just one call:

curl -X POST https://api.arrowcrawl.com/api/v1/meta-ads \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ac_live_..." \
  -d '{"query":"Gymshark","country":"US","status":"active","limit":50}'

The response is a list of ad objects - each with ad_copy, creatives (image/video URLs), platforms, started_running, and the page_name that paid for it.

Why the Ad Library alone isn't enough

The public Ad Library is great for eyeballing one ad, but it falls apart for research. Results are paginated behind lazy-loading JavaScript, creatives are served from expiring CDN URLs, and there is no export button. Meta's official Ad Library API fixes some of that but demands identity verification, a token, and heavy restrictions outside political and social-issue ads. A scraper reads the same public page the way a browser does and hands you structured, exportable data instead.

What you can extract per ad

For each active ad ArrowCrawl returns the full ad copy (primary text, headline, and description), every creative asset - static images and video thumbnails with direct URLs - the platforms the ad runs on, the date it started running and how long it has been live, plus the advertiser page name and CTA. Because you get the started-running date, you can infer which creatives are winners: the ads a brand keeps live for weeks are the ones converting.

Competitor ad research, done right

Pull a competitor's entire active roster, then group by creative type and start date to reverse-engineer their strategy. You can see which hooks they test, when they refresh creative, whether they lean on video or static, and which offers they push into a new season. Feed the ad copy into your own analysis to spot the angles and value props your market responds to. Pair it with ArrowCrawl's marketplace intelligenceand you can connect a competitor's ad push to the exact products they are promoting.

Do it at scale and on a schedule

Query up to 50 ads per request, or submit multiple brands as an async batch with a webhook callback. Every request routes through ArrowCrawl's reputation-scored proxy pool, so blocked IPs are rotated out automatically and you never manage proxies yourself. Run the same query nightly, diff the results, and get alerted the moment a competitor launches a new campaign. See everything the API can do on the features page, or check pricing - you can start free with 1,000 credits a month.