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Extract and flatten 'deeplinkAdCard' JSON from a Facebook Ad Library page

Source: R/get_media.R
get_deeplink.Rd

This function programmatically retrieves the embedded JSON object labeled deeplinkAdCard from the source code of a Facebook Ad Library ad page.

Usage

get_deeplink(ad_id)

Arguments

ad_id

Character string specifying the Facebook ad ID (as shown in the Ad Library URL).

Value

A tibble with one row, containing flattened columns extracted from the deeplink JSON object. Columns depend on the structure of the JSON and may include fields like fevInfo_*, fevInfo_free_form_additional_info_*, fevInfo_learn_more_content_*, and snapshot-related columns.

Details

The function performs the following steps internally:

  1. Fetches the ad page HTML from Facebook's Ad Library for the specified ad_id.

  2. Locates the <script> tag containing the deeplinkAdCard object.

  3. Uses a recursive regular expression to extract the full JSON object following deeplinkAdCard.

  4. Parses the JSON string into a nested R list.

  5. Flattens the JSON into a tidy tibble row, unnesting nested sub-objects such as fevInfo, free_form_additional_info, learn_more_content, and optionally snapshot if present.

The output is designed for downstream analysis: each ad is represented as one row in a tibble, with nested JSON fields expanded into their own columns via tidyr::unnest_wider().

This function complements get_ad_snapshots(), which extracts the snapshot JSON. Use get_deeplink() when additional metadata embedded under deeplinkAdCard is required.

See also

get_ad_snapshots() for extracting snapshot JSON; detectmysnap() for raw JSON detection.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
df <- get_deeplink("1103135646905363")
glimpse(df)
} # }