mlg-meta-mcp

Open-source MCP server for Meta Ads — 30 tools covering account discovery, campaign/ad set/ad management, targeting research, creative inspection, insights, and LLM-friendly workflows.

mlg-meta-mcp is designed for developers and operators who want more than a thin proxy over the Meta Marketing API. It adds account discovery, business-oriented outputs, productivity tools, comparison flows, and targeting/creative tooling that are easier for LLMs and agents to use in real workflows.

Why this project exists

Many Meta Ads MCP servers stop at exposing raw API calls. That is useful, but not always enough for real agent workflows.

This project aims to be more practical in day-to-day usage:

• Automatic account discovery instead of hard-wiring a single account

• Business-oriented insights instead of raw metric dumps

• Safer productivity operations like clone and bulk status changes

• LLM-friendly responses that summarize what happened and why it matters

• Structured comparison logic for period-over-period analysis

Related MCP server: AdWeave Meta Ads

Contract design principle

Core MCP tools should return maximal useful signal for the broadest set of consumers.

• consumers (LLMs, apps, prompts, UI layers) own filtering and interpretation

• formatting and ergonomic summaries are good

• destructive filtering of useful signal in the base tool contract is not

• project-specific business rules should live in higher-level workflows, not in neutral core tool outputs

What it includes today

Account discovery

• Discover all ad accounts accessible by the configured System User token

• Resolve accounts by ID or by account name

• Get full account info (name, currency, timezone, business, status)

Campaign operations

• Get campaigns

• Get full campaign details (bid strategy, buying type, special ad categories, issues)

• Create campaigns

• Update campaigns

• Pause campaigns

• Activate campaigns

Ad set operations

• Get ad sets from an account or campaign

• Get full ad set details (targeting, optimization goal, bid amount, effective status)

• Create ad sets

• Update ad sets

• Pause ad sets

• Activate ad sets

Ad operations

• Get ads

• Get full ad details (effective status, creative ID, issues)

• Update ads (status and bid amount)

Creative inspection

• Get creatives attached to an ad (object_story_spec, image hash, call to action)

Targeting research

• Search interests by keyword

• Get interest suggestions from a seed list

• Validate interests by name or Meta ID

• Browse behaviors

• Browse demographic categories

• Search geo locations by keyword

Budget scheduling

• Create time-bounded budget increases or multipliers for a campaign

Insights and analysis

• Get insights for account, campaign, ad set, or ad

• Compare two explicit periods with business-aware fallback logic

Productivity tools

• Clone campaigns (with ad sets)

• Clone ad sets

• Bulk pause campaigns

• Bulk activate campaigns

• Check alerts with configurable thresholds

Highlighted workflows

This MCP is especially useful for these workflows:

1. Discover accessible ad accounts automatically

2. Inspect campaign, ad set, ad, or account performance

3. Compare campaign performance across two periods

4. Duplicate winning structures quickly

5. Pause or activate many campaigns in one action

6. Generate alert-oriented summaries from Meta Ads data

7. Research and validate targeting audiences

8. Diagnose delivery issues via effective status and issues_info

How compareTwoPeriods works

compareTwoPeriods compares performance between two explicit periods for one of four levels:

• account

• campaign

• adset

• ad

Each side now accepts either:

• datePreset (today, yesterday, last_7d, last_30d, this_month, last_month)

• timeRange with { since, until } in YYYY-MM-DD format

The tool also supports explicit result selection:

• primary_from_insights (default) — resolve one action type from the insights and apply it to both periods

• specific_action — compare one explicit Meta action_type like lead or purchase

• all_actions — sum all action types

It also supports optional metric selection:

• spend

• results

• cpr

• impressions

• clicks

• ctr

If metrics is omitted, the tool keeps the backward-compatible default set: spend, results, and cpr.

The response now makes the resolved result definition explicit so consumers can see what results means.

For account, adset, and ad

The comparison is direct:

• current period for the same object

• previous period for the same object

For campaign

Campaign comparisons use a smarter fallback chain:

1. Same campaign in the previous period

2. Most similar campaign in the same account

3. Account campaign average for the previous period

4. No reference available

The tool response explicitly tells the user which reference was used.

Similar campaign logic

The similar-campaign fallback is not based only on naming.

It requires:

• same campaign objective

• same dominant ad set optimizationGoal

Then it ranks valid candidates using:

• budget similarity

• bid strategy match

• billing event match

• name similarity as a tie-breaker

Installation

git clone https://github.com/iammalego/mlg-meta-mcp.git
cd mlg-meta-mcp
npm install
cp .env.example .env

Then edit .env with your Meta credentials.

Configuration

Required environment variables

META_SYSTEM_USER_TOKEN=your_system_user_token_here
META_API_VERSION=v22.0
LOG_LEVEL=info

Required Meta permissions

Your token should have permissions appropriate for the operations you want to run. In most setups, that includes:

• ads_management

• ads_read

• business_management

Local development

npm run dev

Production build

npm run build
npm start

MCP client setup

Claude Desktop

Add this to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mlg-meta-mcp": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/mlg-meta-mcp/dist/index.js"],
      "env": {
        "META_SYSTEM_USER_TOKEN": "your_token_here",
        "META_API_VERSION": "v22.0",
        "LOG_LEVEL": "info"
      }
    }
  }
}

Generic stdio usage

Any MCP client that supports stdio transport can run this server by starting the compiled dist/index.js entrypoint.

Available tools

30 tools total.

Account tools

• discoverAdAccounts

• getAccountInfo

Campaign tools

• getCampaigns

• getCampaignDetails

• updateCampaign

• pauseCampaign

• activateCampaign

• cloneCampaign

• bulkPauseCampaigns

• bulkActivateCampaigns

Ad set tools

• getAdSets

• getAdSetDetails

• updateAdSet

• pauseAdSet

• activateAdSet

• cloneAdSet

Ad tools

• getAds

• getAdDetails

• updateAd

Creative tools

• getAdCreatives

Targeting tools

• searchInterests

• getInterestSuggestions

• validateInterests

• searchBehaviors

• searchDemographics

• searchGeoLocations

Budget tools

• createBudgetSchedule

Insights tools

• getInsights

• compareTwoPeriods

• checkAlerts

Example prompts

These are the kinds of prompts this MCP is designed to support well:

• "List all ad accounts accessible with this token."

• "Show active campaigns for the account named Plannit."

• "Get full details for campaign 123 including issues and delivery status."

• "Compare this campaign between last_7d and last_30d."

• "If the campaign did not exist in the previous period, explain which fallback reference was used."

• "Clone this campaign and reduce its budget by 20%."

• "Pause these campaigns as a dry run first."

• "Check alerts for yesterday using a CPR threshold of 5000."

• "Search interests related to 'sustainable fashion' and suggest related ones."

• "Validate these interest IDs before using them in a new ad set."

• "Schedule a budget increase of 20% for campaign 123 this weekend."

Architecture

The codebase is intentionally split into layers:

• src/tools/index.ts → MCP tool definitions and Zod-first schemas

• src/tools/handlers.ts → MCP-facing handlers and MCP response envelopes (text summaries plus structured content when useful)

• src/services/* → business logic

• src/api/* → Meta API clients (GraphClient, InsightsClient, BusinessClient, TargetingClient, CreativeClient)

• src/types/* → shared types

This separation helps keep the MCP surface, business logic, and Meta API integration independent.

For example, getInsights keeps a readable text summary, but non-account levels also preserve itemized structured metrics so clients can do their own ranking, filtering, and interpretation.

compareTwoPeriods follows the same idea: text output only includes the requested (or defaulted) metrics, while structuredContent.metrics exposes both the requested metric list and the returned per-metric values/change objects.

Quality and project status

Current technical foundations:

• TypeScript strict mode

• Zod-first tool schemas

• Structured logging with Pino

• Categorized error handling

• Vitest test setup

• MCP SDK integration over stdio

Project status:

• actively evolving

• suitable for local/self-hosted usage

• focused on practical Meta Ads workflows for MCP clients and agents

Roadmap

Planned features:

• Delivery diagnosis — explain why a campaign, ad set, or ad is not delivering (billing issues, policy violations, parent paused, bid too low, etc.) using issues_info and effective_status

• Learning phase status — expose whether an ad set is in learning, how many conversions remain to exit, and whether it is LEARNING_LIMITED and why

• Ad fatigue detection — detect when an ad needs creative rotation by combining frequency trends with CTR decay

• Attribution comparison — side-by-side view of 1d/7d click and view attribution windows for the same object

• Placement breakdown — performance by placement (Feed, Stories, Reels, Audience Network, Messenger)

Possible future directions:

• remote MCP support

• broader automation and monitoring flows

Testing

npm test
npm run test:coverage
npm run type-check
npm run lint

Documentation

• Architecture

• API Reference

• Contributing

• Changelog

Contributing

Contributions, issues, and feedback are welcome.

If you want to contribute, start with:

1. reading the architecture docs

2. checking existing issues

3. opening a focused PR or improvement proposal

License

MIT © iammalego

Acknowledgments

• Model Context Protocol

• Meta Marketing API

• The open-source MCP ecosystem