Meta Ads Skill

meta-ads-skill

A skill that teaches an AI coding agent — Claude Code, Cursor, or anything that reads Markdown instructions — how to set up Meta (Facebook/Instagram) Marketing API access, publish campaigns programmatically, drive the parts of the UI that have no API, and verify conversion tracking in a way that actually holds up.

Everything in here was learned by getting it wrong in production first. The API rejections are real rejections with their real causes, the permission chain is the one that actually unblocks token generation, and there is a whole section on verification because three separate confidently-wrong conclusions came out of measuring with instruments that structurally could not see the thing being measured.

Why this exists

Meta's Marketing API docs describe the endpoints. They do not tell you:

• that a system user needs a role on the app before it can generate a token, and that the failure gives you no hint which of four grants is missing
• that a Development-mode app blocks ad creative creation only, so it fails at the very end of a long script
• that fbq.loaded is set by the inline stub and is true even when the real library was blocked by your CSP
• that navigator.sendBeacon — which fbevents uses whenever an eventID is present — is invisible to devtools Network and to performance.getEntriesByType('resource')
• that Meta crops a 1080×1920 asset by ~420px per end for square feed placements, which is where most impressions land

Each of those cost hours. They are all written down here.

Install

Claude Code

git clone https://github.com/boringmarketer/meta-ads-skill.git ~/.claude/skills/meta-ads

Restart Claude Code. It picks up `SKILL.md` and loads it when you ask about Meta ads. For a single project instead, clone to `.claude/skills/meta-ads/`.

Any other agent

Clone it anywhere and point the agent at `SKILL.md`:

Read SKILL.md in ./meta-ads-skill and follow it.

The ref