Playbook: Meta Ad Library

All rules here are best practice, not law. Override any of them when the campaign calls for it; note the best practice once and move on.

Use when: the angle depends on the prospect spending money on paid social right now, creative agencies, UGC shops, CRO and landing-page services, media buyers, attribution and analytics tools, or anyone selling to ecommerce brands that already advertise.

Do not use when: you only need to know a company exists or sells online (playbook-tech-on-website), or you want LinkedIn organic activity (playbook-linkedin-engagement). Facebook and Instagram only, not Google Ads, not TikTok, not LinkedIn ads.

One-line output: ad_library_line = "you are using ai to run outbound campaigns with one command"

1. Trigger and scope

One question per row: is this company running ads on Meta right now, and what is the ad actually about.

The hard part is not the ad library. It is the input. The Meta Ad Library is keyed to a Facebook Page; your lists are keyed to a company domain. Nothing maps one to the other for free. So most of this playbook is a discovery chain that turns a domain into a verified Facebook Page URL, plus the gates that stop that chain from returning the wrong company's page. Ungated, it confidently returned a golfer's page for ridge.com and a pottery studio for clay.com.

Two things it deliberately does not do:

• It never reports a raw ad count to a prospect. Meta's totalCount counts collated duplicates and overstates reality, one brand showed 950 for what was really about three creatives.
• It never guesses. When a page cannot be verified, the row abstains with an empty string rather than shipping a plausible-looking wrong page.

2. Output contract

Inputs required per row