Clay Tutorial For PPC Agencies: How to Find Companies Running Facebook Ads With Apify
If you’re running a PPC agency, you know that finding qualified leads is half the battle. For years, we’ve been using Apollo to build lists based on tech stack criteria—identifying businesses using Google Ads or Meta Ads pixels. While this approach has worked (we have clients who’ve stayed with us for over a year), I’ve discovered a method that’s significantly more effective.
In this tutorial, I’m going to walk you through our latest Clay workflow that uses Apify to scrape the Facebook Ad Library and automatically qualify leads for PPC agencies. This is the exact system we’re using right now to generate leads for our agency clients.
Why This Method Works Better
The beauty of this approach is simple: you’re targeting companies that are already running Facebook ads. They’ve already made the decision to invest in paid advertising, which means they understand its value. You’re not trying to convince someone cold that PPC is worthwhile—you’re positioning yourself as someone who can optimize what they’re already doing.
Step 1: Setting Up Apify’s Facebook Ad Library Scraper
The first component of this workflow is Apify’s Facebook Ad Library scraper. At just 75 cents per 1,000 ads, it’s incredibly affordable. Here’s how it works:
Navigate to the Facebook Ad Library and enter your search term—for example, “HVAC service” or “law firm.” Set your filters to show only currently active ads, then run the Apify actor. It will pull all the relevant data including page names, ad content, and more.
Two Ways to Import Apify Data Into Clay
There are two methods for getting your Apify data into Clay:
Method 1: Import Data from Apify Actor (Recommended)
This is my preferred approach. After running your actor in Apify, you simply set up a source in Clay by typing “Apify” and selecting “Import data from Apify actor.” Choose your actor, select the task or run, and Clay will pull in all the data. For full automation, you can schedule the scraper to run weekly in Apify and sync it with Clay on the same schedule.
Method 2: Run Apify Actor Directly in Clay
Clay also has an action step that runs Apify actors directly within your table. While this can work well for smaller datasets, I found that for Facebook ad data, the cell size often exceeded Clay’s limits. The data returned was simply too large. However, this method is worth knowing about for other use cases with smaller data sets.
Step 2: Qualifying Companies
Once you have the raw data from Apify, not all of it will be relevant. You’ll need to filter and qualify the companies. Here’s how we do it:
First, we extract the company domain based on the page name. This can be hit-or-miss, but it works in most cases. Then we categorize and exclude companies that aren’t a good fit—competitors like advertising agencies, businesses that can’t advertise on Google (CBD, vaping, etc.), and irrelevant categories.
We send qualified companies to a separate table where we enrich them with company descriptions. Then we use an AI prompt to determine if they can actually benefit from PPC services. The prompt checks whether they need Google Ads or Facebook Ads support and disqualifies companies that aren’t even permitted to advertise on these platforms.
Step 3: Finding Decision Makers
Once you have a list of qualified companies, you need to find the right people to contact. In Clay, you set up a “Find People” search and select your qualified companies table as the source. Pro tip: Use the filtered view so you’re only pulling people from companies that passed your qualification criteria.
Add filters for job titles and locations, then use another AI prompt to qualify the job titles. For example, if someone’s title is “Salesforce Administrator,” they’re probably not a decision-maker for PPC services. The AI catches these and filters them out.
Step 4: Email Enrichment
With your qualified contacts identified, the next step is finding valid email addresses. We use Lead Magic as our primary tool, and if it doesn’t return a valid email, we fall back to other email finders and validate them again with Lead Magic.
We also identify emails using security gateways, which we either skip or put into separate campaigns for later outreach.
Step 5: Advanced Personalization
This is where the magic happens. We run several AI enrichments to create highly personalized messaging:
Overlooked Keywords
We use a prompt that first generates obvious keywords the company would target (like “personal injury lawyer Chicago”), then identifies longtail, high-intent keywords they’re probably overlooking. This gives you conversation starters that demonstrate expertise and provide immediate value.
Top Competitors
We identify the company’s top two competitors in their specific market. This is tricky—you need to be careful about whether they’re local, regional, or nationwide. Getting this wrong can make you look foolish, so the prompt needs to be robust and well-tested.
Company-Specific Details
We extract specific details about what the company does, who they serve, and what makes them unique. We also determine the industry-specific terminology they use for consultations or meetings, and create curiosity-driven subject lines tailored to their business.
Job Title Personalization
We customize the greeting based on their role—using “the director,” “a managing partner,” or “one of the co-founders” as appropriate.
Step 6: Quality Control and Export
Before sending leads to your outreach tool, we run a final quality check using a formula that verifies all personalization fields contain values and don’t have any weird symbols or quotation marks that would make your message look scraped.
Once everything checks out, the contacts are ready to be added to Instantly, SmartLead, Reply, or whatever cold email platform you prefer.
Why This Workflow Is So Powerful
The combination of targeting active advertisers with deep, AI-powered personalization creates outreach that doesn’t feel like outreach. You’re demonstrating that you’ve done your homework, you understand their business, and you have specific insights that could help them improve their advertising performance.
This isn’t spray-and-pray. It’s precision-targeted outreach to pre-qualified prospects who are already spending money on the exact services you provide.
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