Facebook Page Post Tracker: AI Winning Posts & Offers on the Apify Store →

How to track competitor Facebook pages and find their winning posts

Tutorial article (800–1500 words) for the Apify blog guest program, dev.to, Medium, Hashnode. The owner publishes it and records the URL in brief.json → marketing.links.

The problem

You follow five rival Facebook pages. Every Monday you open each one, scroll the week, and try to remember which post took off, which one announced a discount and what the code was. Reactions, comments and shares are on the page, but a page with 10,000 followers and a page with 800 are not comparable, so "1,200 reactions" tells you nothing until you know that page's usual. It takes about 6 minutes a post to read it, check its numbers against the page and note the offer — 10 hours for 100 posts — and the posts where someone asks "where can I buy this?" are buried in the scroll.

Step by step

1. Open the Actor and click Try it. The form is pre-filled with 8 sample posts from three pages; press Start. In seconds 4 posts come back, ranked: a spring sale at 5.6× its page's median engagement, a product launch at 2.3×, a question that drew 142 comments, and a parent asking where to buy a kids balance bike. Nothing is charged for the demo.
2. Replace the sample with your own page links under Facebook page links — for example three competitors' pages — and leave AI assessment on. The Actor runs the Facebook Profile & Posts Scraper on your Apify account (about $0.006 per post, capped by Max source spend), compares every post with the median of its own page and keeps only the ones that qualify.
3. Open the Shortlist view: page, type, how many times the page's median, the reason and the takeaway. The **Offers & launches** view shows the discount, price, deadline and promo code of each promotion, copied from the post. The Buying intent & replies view lists people asking where to buy, with a short public reply to post.
4. Export to CSV or Excel, or send the rows to a webhook.

What a run costs

Four pages × 20 posts = 80 posts scanned; about 28 qualify (an estimate until a live run is measured). The scan costs $0.48 on your account. Here you pay $0.0043 per qualified post — $0.01 with AI plus about $0.003 of tokens. Your first 25 posts are free, so the first run costs the scan plus three posts. A rules-only run is about $0.60, a run with AI about $0.84. Posts that fail your filters, empty posts and posts you already received are never charged here.

Automate it

Click Schedule on the saved task, put your address in "E-mail me the new posts" and every run with new posts sends a digest with the trend since the last run. Each post is remembered by its Facebook post id, so next week you pay only for new ones. From code:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("<your-apify-username>/fb-page-post-tracker").call(run_input={
    "sourceMode": "actor",
    "pageUrls": ["https://www.facebook.com/starbucks", "https://www.facebook.com/dunkin"],
    "goalDescription": "Competitor posts that announce an offer or a launch",
    "maxQualified": 50,
    "maxDiscoveryChargeUsd": 0.5,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["url"], item["score"], item["postType"])

Facebook Page Post Tracker: AI Winning Posts & Offers on the Apify Store →