Automating B2B Lead Generation: How to Scrape Meta Ads Library for Cold Email Campaigns

In today’s competitive business landscape, finding new leads consistently is crucial for growing your client base. By leveraging publicly available data from Meta’s Ad Library, you can create an automated system that identifies potential clients and feeds them directly into your outreach campaigns.

The Power of Meta’s Ad Library for Lead Generation

Meta’s Ad Library provides transparency about advertisements running on their platforms. While primarily designed for transparency purposes, this repository offers valuable intelligence about businesses that are actively investing in advertising—making them prime candidates for B2B services.

Companies running ads are already investing in growth, which means they may be receptive to solutions that could enhance their marketing efforts or business operations. This is particularly valuable for agencies offering services like AI chatbots, voice assistants, or other business optimization tools.

Building an Automated Lead Generation System

The automated workflow described in this article performs several key functions:

Scrapes the Meta Ad Library for businesses running ads with specific keywords
Stores unique company data in a Google Sheet database
Extracts contact information from each company’s Facebook page
Automatically adds qualified leads to a cold email campaign
Runs on a weekly schedule to continuously generate new leads

System Components and Workflow

Step 1: Scraping the Meta Ad Library

The workflow begins by targeting businesses running specific ads—in our example, dental offices advertising teeth whitening services. Using the Apify platform’s scrapers, the system extracts information about advertisers from Meta’s Ad Library.

Key implementation details include:

Dynamically calculating a 30-day window to ensure only recent ads are captured
Formatting search queries to target specific business types
Using asynchronous processing to handle large volumes of data

Step 2: Data Management and Enrichment

Once the initial ad data is collected, the system:

Removes duplicate entries to ensure each company appears only once
Filters out Instagram-only profiles that don’t have Facebook pages
Stores the data in a Google Sheet that serves as a persistent database
Tracks which companies have already been processed to avoid redundant work

Step 3: Contact Information Extraction

The next phase involves visiting each company’s Facebook page to extract valuable contact information:

Business name
Email address
Phone number
Website URL
Physical address

This enrichment process turns basic advertiser data into actionable lead information that can be used for outreach campaigns.

Step 4: Cold Email Campaign Integration

The final step is feeding these qualified leads into a cold email platform (Instantly):

Only leads with valid email addresses are added to the campaign
The system tracks which leads have already been added to avoid duplicates
Rate limiting is implemented to ensure API requests don’t exceed platform limits
Error logging captures any issues for troubleshooting

Implementing the System with N8N

This entire workflow is built using N8N, a powerful workflow automation tool. The implementation includes:

Scheduled triggers to run the workflow automatically
API integrations with Apify for web scraping
Google Sheets integration for database management
Webhooks for asynchronous communication between components
Code nodes for data transformation and formatting
Conditional logic to handle different scenarios

Results and Benefits

This automated lead generation system offers several key advantages:

Continuous lead flow without manual intervention
Highly targeted prospecting based on specific ad criteria
Efficient use of resources by avoiding duplicate outreach
Scalable approach that can be adjusted based on capacity

Even with relatively small sample sizes (300-400 emails), this approach has proven effective at generating interested prospects and converting them into paying clients.

Customizing for Your Business

While this example targets dental offices advertising teeth whitening services, the same approach can be adapted for virtually any B2B vertical:

Change the search terms to target different types of businesses
Adjust the scraping volume based on your capacity to handle leads
Customize the email sequence to match your specific service offerings
Modify the schedule frequency to align with your sales process

Conclusion

Automating lead generation through Meta’s Ad Library represents a powerful approach to B2B prospecting. By identifying businesses that are already investing in growth through advertising, you can focus your outreach efforts on prospects that are more likely to be receptive to your services.

With the right automation tools and a systematic approach, you can create a continuous pipeline of qualified leads flowing into your sales process—all without the daily grind of manual prospecting.