I spent a good chunk of yesterday messing around with that new Meta Ads CLI tool they put out. Honestly, my main takeaway is that I am com...
I spent a good chunk of yesterday messing around with that new Meta Ads CLI tool they put out. Honestly, my main takeaway is that I am completely sick of the regular Ads Manager interface web page, so almost anything else looks good to me right now. If I have to look at that little grey loading circle one more time while trying to duplicate a campaign, I’m going to lose my mind.
The installation was a pain, though. They say you need Python 3.12 or higher, and of course, my machine was running 3.10 because I hadn’t updated my environment in forever. So I had to spend twenty minutes just getting Homebrew to update Python, which broke a couple of other unrelated local paths I use for some basic data scraping scripts. Typical. Once you actually get it installed via pip install meta-ads-cli, you run meta auth login. It opens a browser window to handle the Facebook OAuth login anyway, which feels a bit stupid for a tool that’s supposed to keep you in the command line, but I guess you can’t get around security tokens.
The Mandatory Safety Net
The thing that I keep thinking about is how they handled the status when you create something new. Everything you build through the CLI defaults to PAUSED. Meta explicitly states in the docs that you can't bypass this with a command flag. At first, I thought that was just annoying hand-holding. If I’m typing out a whole string of parameters in a terminal, I obviously know what I want to happen. But then I remembered a client account from last year where a junior media buyer accidentally set a daily budget instead of a lifetime budget on a broad prospecting campaign. It spent like $6,000 over a weekend before anyone noticed because the notifications went to an old email alias. So fine, forcing a manual check inside the actual browser dashboard before anything goes live is probably smart, even if it adds an extra step to my day.
When you pull data, it spits it out as text tables or JSON. The tables look neat in the terminal window, but the columns get totally warped if your campaign names are long, which mine always are because we use a strict naming convention with date stamps and geo-targets. So the text table becomes basically unreadable. The JSON option is the only one that actually matters. If you pipe the output into jq, you can filter for specific fields like inline_link_click_ctr or spend instantly. It’s way faster than waiting for the heavy, clunky custom columns in Ads Manager to load. Though, to be fair, staring at raw JSON arrays to check if an ad is dying feels incredibly retro. It reminds me of looking at server logs back in college. Not necessarily a bad thing, just weird for a marketing job.
Scripts, Constraints, and Reality
I’m still not convinced this is actually useful for anyone running a small brand or spending less than like $10k a month. If you only have two or three active campaigns, opening up a terminal is just extra work for no reason. It’s clearly built for people trying to let AI agents or automated backend scripts manage their stuff. Like, if you have an e-commerce store with constantly fluctuating inventory, you could write a script that queries your warehouse database and then uses the Meta CLI to instantly pause an ad set the exact minute an item goes out of stock. You don’t have to build out a massive, custom API integration application from scratch anymore. You just call the CLI command in a basic cron job or whatever.
I forgot to mention the creative side of it. You can build ad creatives through it by linking to image URLs and specifying text strings, but it feels incredibly disconnected. You can’t visually see how the copy truncates on an Instagram Stories placement vs. a Facebook desktop feed. You’re always going to need to log into the web UI anyway to make sure the primary text doesn’t look completely cut off or weirdly formatted. For that reason alone, I don't see myself ever using this to actually build ads from scratch. The risk of something looking ugly to a user is too high.
But for the boring, bulk administrative tasks like changing a specific URL tracking parameter across fifty different ad sets because the analytics team decided to alter the UTM structure it’s so much better than clicking through forty different dropdown menus in the browser. I have a massive creative refresh coming up next week for a seasonal push, and I’m going to try using it just for the bulk duplication and naming stuff. We’ll see if it actually holds up or if I get frustrated by some random syntax error and just go back to clicking around in Chrome.
References & Citations
Official Product Launch: Introducing Ads CLI: A Command-Line Interface for Meta Ads and Commerce — Meta for Developers Blog.
Technical Documentation & Specifications: Meta Ads AI Connectors: Ads CLI Overview — Meta Developer Documentation.
