Stay in chat. Skip Ads Manager.
Meta just dropped an official Ads connector for Claude. It's in beta. It works. And it changes what "managing your ads" means for anyone who's been avoiding Ads Manager for years.
This guide walks through the setup, the three prompts to run on day one, and the rule that keeps you from blowing up your account on day two.
The connector, in plain English.
Meta built a tool that lets Claude talk directly to your ad account. Not through a third party. Not through a plugin. Through Meta's own infrastructure.
Once it's connected, Claude can read your campaigns, draft new ones, pull performance data, and suggest budget moves. You stay in chat. Ads Manager stays closed.
The official name is "Manage Ads from an AI Agent." It's free. It works in Claude Pro or Max. And it covers Facebook and Instagram ads from the same connection.
Before you start.
Meta Business account
With at least one ad account you have admin access to. If you've been running ads through someone else's Business Manager, you need admin permission on that ad account or your own Business account first.
Claude Pro or Max
Free tier won't connect to the Meta Ads connector. Pro and Max both work.
20 minutes
Most of that is the first three prompts, not the setup itself. Setup is five minutes.
A live ad account
You need real campaigns to look at. The connector is most useful on data, not on a fresh account.
Connect Meta to Claude in 5 minutes.
Open Claude in your browser. Go to Settings, then Connectors. Search for "Meta Ads" and click Connect.
Claude will open a Meta authorization window. Sign in to your Facebook account, pick the ad account you want to connect, and approve the permissions. Meta handles the auth. Claude doesn't store your credentials.
When you land back in Claude, the connector shows as active. That's it. You're in.
If you have multiple ad accounts, you can connect them all and tell Claude which one to use in each prompt.
The three to run on day one.
Don't try to launch a real campaign on day one. Run these three first. They confirm the connector works, they teach you what your account looks like to Claude, and they give you something useful within five minutes.
Show me a summary of my Meta ad account from the last 30 days. Include total spend, number of active campaigns, and the top-performing campaign by ROAS.
Paste this into a new Claude chat with the Meta Ads connector enabled.
List my last 10 ads with their cost per result. Identify the 3 lowest performers and tell me what they have in common.
Paste this into the same chat. Pattern recognition is where Claude saves you the most time.
Give me a Monday-morning digest of last week's Meta ad performance. Include total spend, total revenue, blended ROAS, top 3 ads by ROAS with daily budget and cost per result, bottom 3 ads with the same data, and one specific recommendation for what to scale or kill this week. Format as a 5-bullet summary I can read in 60 seconds.
Save this prompt in your prompt library. Run it every Monday.
Always keep new campaigns paused.
This is the rule that keeps your account safe.
When you ask Claude to build a new campaign, tell it to create the campaign paused. Always. No exceptions on day one, no exceptions on day fifty. Review the targeting, the budget, the creative, and the schedule before you flip it live.
The connector is powerful enough that "build me a campaign" can become "spend my budget" in two seconds if you skip the review.
Common traps.
- Don't connect a client's ad account on day one. Test on your own first. The connector is in beta and you don't want a client's account to be where you find a bug.
- Don't let Claude pick the audience without checking. It's good at synthesizing what you tell it. It's not good at knowing which of your past audiences actually converted. Feed it the audience name and let it work from there.
- Don't skip the daily budget cap. Set one. Tell Claude what it is. The connector respects it, but only if it knows.