Meta Ads

Meta Ads

Meta advertising spans Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network. Data is organized under ad accounts (act_* ids), then campaigns, ad sets, and ads.

First moves

1. Ad accounts — discover act_* ids and currencies for the connected business.
2. Campaign structure — list campaigns, ad sets, and ads for one account before drilling into ids.
3. Pages — read promoted Pages tied to the ad account for creative context.
4. Insights — pull account-, campaign-, ad-set-, or ad-level metrics with date preset, breakdowns, or custom date range.
5. Activities — audit recent account changes (budget, status, targeting).
6. Targeting search — resolve interest or geo ids at runtime instead of hardcoding.
7. Audiences — read custom and saved audiences attached to the account.

Hierarchy

Business (optional) → Ad account → Campaign → Ad set → Ad. Insights can roll up at each level. Ad account ids often appear with an act_ prefix; numeric ids work the same way.

Operational order

1. Resolve ad_account_id when the user names an account or you need spend context.
2. Pull structure (campaigns → ad sets → ads) to anchor object ids.
3. Fetch insights for the same objects with last 7 days or an explicit date range; add breakdowns when the question is demographic or geo split.
4. Read activities when the user asks what changed recently.
5. Search targeting before building interest-based specs.
6. Read audiences when the question is targeting or remarketing lists.
7. Read ad creatives by id when reviewing copy, thumbnails, or story specs tied to live ads.
8. Keep paging structure and insights lists — follow the next page from the prior response until done.

Writes

Create campaigns paused, then ad sets with targeting and budgets, then creatives (upload images or videos first), then ads. Pause or delete with explicit confirmation on destructive status changes. Budget updates are in account currency minor units (cents).

Gotchas

• App Review — read access works immediately for app admins, developers, and test users; production access for other people's ad accounts often needs Meta App Review approval.
• Rate limits — throttling is per app and ad account; page sequentially instead of wide parallel fan-out.
• Insights latency — recent-day metrics can lag; use last 7 days for stable reporting unless the user needs today only.
• Breakdowns — age, gender, country, and similar dimensions return segmented insight rows.
• Interest ids — search targeting at runtime; do not hardcode stale interest ids.
• Pagination — long campaign, ad set, and audience lists paginate; follow the next page from the prior response.