Facebook marketing API - how to Copy Ads / creatives

2
votes

On facebook's documentation, in "What's New" they have a link titled "Copy and Reuse Ads with Ads Copy API." which leads to this. Here, they have 3 links, all of them are currently broken.

My question is, how can I copy (and change) an ad, and more specifically, the ad's creative, which is immutable (therefore the need to copy instead of update)?

Update

At the time, we did get some information from our contact at Facebook. However, it meant this wasn't a good approach for us.

Also, there is now new documentation on copying ads, yet still it does not help us specifically, since it does not allow updating ad-creatives.

We've since abandoned this effort, and in fact, solve the problem by having Marketing personnel export the ads, update the field we needed by a script in an Excel file, then uploading back to Facebook.

1
facebookfacebook-graph-api
Suggest you go and file a documentation bug, so that they can fix the links. developers.facebook.com/bugs - CBroe
Agreed. Should I fix my question, or remove it? (I am assuming it'll take them long to fix the documentation) - H.Wolper
any update on this? - aks
@aks, yes. I'll update the original question. - H.Wolper

1 Answers

3
votes

The Ad Copy feature https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/buying-api/ad-units#ad-copies includes 3 kinds of copies, on campaign, ad set, or ad level. There is not an ad creative copy function.

And there probably should not. Ad creatives are immutable, as you know. So why you want to copy another immutable one, instead of using the existing one?

I assume your questions is about how to get the specs of an existing ad creative, modify the specs somehow, and use the new spec to create a new ad creative.

Then, how to get the specs of an existing ad creative: use "effective_object_story_id", which will always give you an id no matter the ad creative was created using an existing post (thus an id was provided) or from scratch (thus an object_story_spec was provided). Once you get that id, in the format of _, you can just query that id directly, using /v2.9/. Then you can get all the specs. Modify it, and create a new ad creative using those specs.

Yes, this is more work than just copy an ad creative. But I believe you are not actually asking for a copy.

Good luck.