Get Facebook Ad Library ad details

Returns one ad from the Facebook Ad Library. Video creatives land in content.media_urls (playable URL) and content.thumbnail_url (preview frame); every ad signal rides the post.ext.ad envelope: CTA text and type, link_url, is_active, end_date_iso, display_format, title, publisher_platforms, categories, the video URLs, and the advertiser's own page_id, page_profile_uri (their Facebook page, so you can chain straight to /v1/facebook/profile), page_like_count and page_categories. spend, reach_estimate and currency are populated by Facebook for POLITICAL and issue ads only and read null or empty on a commercial ad; Facebook publishes no per-ad impression count outside that same political set, so there is no impressions figure to return. post.author.username is null by design: an Ad Library record carries the page NAME, not its handle, and a name is not a handle. An ad has no public view count, so engagement.views carries Facebook's audience REACH ESTIMATE where one exists (political and issue ads) and is null everywhere else; the same figure is on post.ext.ad.reach_estimate under its real name, and computed.engagement_rate is derived from it rather than from any real engagement. published_at is the ad's first-run DATE; the 07:00:00Z clock component on every row is an artefact of Facebook storing ad dates on a US Pacific day boundary and carries no sub-day meaning. On an ad that ran in the EU, Facebook publishes who saw it: post.ext.ad.eu_total_reach is the total EU reach, post.ext.ad.eu_reach_breakdown lists each EU country with that reach split into age bands (18-24 to 65+) by male, female and unknown, and post.ext.ad.targets_eu, target_ages, target_gender and target_locations are who the advertiser targeted. An ad that never ran in the EU carries none of these, and they read null. For ad video transcripts use /v1/facebook/adlibrary/ad/transcript (separate endpoint, premium tier).

get/facebook/adlibrary/ad

Request

Base URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1
URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/facebook/adlibrary/ad
Auth: API key in header x-api-key

Query parameters

idstring

Facebook Ad Library ad ID. Ad ids rotate as campaigns end, so take a current one from /v1/facebook/adlibrary/company/ads or /v1/facebook/adlibrary/search/ads rather than reusing an old one. (one of: id, url; at least one required)

urlstring

Facebook Ad Library URL for the ad (https://www.facebook.com/ads/library?id=...). A page URL is rejected with a 400 at 0 credits. (one of: id, url; at least one required)

trimboolean

Set to true for a trimmed down version of the response

Headers

Cache-Controlstring

Send no-cache to bypass the response cache and force a live fetch. Billed at the normal endpoint cost; the fresh result is written back to cache for the next caller. Only the no-cache directive triggers this. See the Response Schema guide for details.

Idempotency-Keystring

Optional UUID that makes the request safely retriable. The key is reserved atomically per account before billing. A concurrent retry receives 409 IDEMPOTENCY_IN_PROGRESS with a Retry-After of 1 second while the original is young, growing to a quarter of the time it has been running (at most 30); a crashed reservation expires after 5 minutes. A replay keeps the cached payload immutable except for billing metadata: credits_used becomes 0, idempotent_replay becomes true, and credits_remaining is refreshed to the current balance. A known current balance appears in both the body and X-Credits-Remaining header; no balance row resolves to 0. On a transient lookup failure, body credits_remaining is null and X-Credits-Remaining is omitted. Completed outcomes expire after 24 hours. If the claim store is unavailable, the request fails closed before billing. GET endpoints do not combine idempotent replay with Server-Sent Events: use Accept: application/json when sending this header. The unsupported key-plus-SSE combination is rejected before billing.

Response

Successful response

successboolean required

Whether the request succeeded

platformstring required

Platform name

endpointstring required

API endpoint path

credits_usedinteger required

Number of credits consumed

credits_remaininginteger nullable required

Current account balance, or null when this response could not establish one. Free cache hits always return null because they do not establish an authoritative post-request balance. An idempotency replay also returns null when its current-balance lookup fails. It is never a fabricated zero, so a zero here means the account really is empty. The authoritative reading is the one on a billed response, which comes straight from the deduction.

request_idstring required

Unique request identifier for support

cachedboolean required

Whether the response was served from cache

idempotent_replayboolean

True only when this response is an idempotency replay

Example response

{
  "success": true,
  "platform": "facebook",
  "endpoint": "/v1/facebook/adlibrary/ad",
  "credits_used": 1,
  "credits_remaining": 4999,
  "request_id": "req-abc123",
  "idempotent_replay": true,
  "meta": {
    "hint": {
      "code": "search_multi",
      "message": "You searched \"matcha\" on 3 platforms one call at a time; /v1/search/multi returns each platform's own search rows in one call at the same price per platform, and a platform with no rows is not charged.",
      "method": "GET",
      "path": "/v1/search/multi?query=matcha&platforms=instagram,tiktok,youtube"
    }
  }
}

Changes

No recorded changes to this operation across all 1 revision of this API.