How I cut Meta ads reporting to 45 Seconds

I've spent over $50 million on Meta ads over 15 years. My team has managed tens of millions more.

And I hate the interface.

Every media buyer I know hates it. It’s a $150 billion platform that lags when you scroll, hides critical metrics behind three sub-menus, and makes you sweat every time you hit 'Publish'. It’s a cockpit designed by people who have never flown the plane.

Yesterday, I started managing my ads through a chat interface instead.

I'm not going back.

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Take control of your ads

Meta Ads Manager is hostile software.

Things move. Columns disappear. Features break without warning. The data you need is buried under 47 clicks, 3 exports, and a pivot table you built six months ago and forgot how to use.

You want to see spend vs. ROAS by creative type, sorted by day of week, compared to last month?

That's either:

So you stopped asking.

The question was valuable. But the friction wasn't worth it.

You rationed your curiosity.

Every operator running paid media has questions they'd love to ask their data but don't. Because the cost of getting the answer exceeds the value of knowing.

That's insane. The data is sitting right there. You're paying for it. You just can't access it without fighting the interface.

Here's what makes this urgent.

Two years ago, the edge in paid media was targeting. Find the right audience before your competitors. Build custom lookalikes. Stack interest layers. Win the auction with precision.

That edge is gone.

Meta's AI has commoditized targeting. Advantage+ feeds everyone the same audiences. The algorithm decides who sees what. And it's getting better at it than most media buyers ever were.

So what's left?

Creative velocity.

The brands crushing right now didn’t find a secret audience toggle in the Meta dashboard. They're winning because they're testing more. Learning faster. Iterating before anybody else does. Speed is everything.

But velocity requires visibility. You can't move fast if you can't see clearly.

Your agency sends a performance deck every two weeks. Your internal team does a weekly review. In between? Guessing. Reacting. Playing defense.

When asking a question costs 45 minutes, you ration your curiosity. You only ask what's "worth it."

When asking a question costs 45 seconds, you ask everything. You follow threads. You spot patterns before they become problems. You iterate in hours instead of weeks.

Curiosity becomes free. And free curiosity compounds.

The operators who win in 2026 are the ones with real-time visibility and zero friction to insight.

Which brings me to what changed.

AI can now connect directly to your ad account and answer questions in real time.

Not summarize a CSV you uploaded. Not analyze a screenshot you pasted. Actually pull live data from Meta and respond in plain English.

Instead of clicking through Ads Manager, you ask:

"Show me my top 5 creatives by ROAS this month."

"Which ad sets have declining CTR week-over-week?"

"Compare my prospecting campaigns vs. retargeting. What's working?"

And you get answers. In seconds.

You're still the strategist. You're still making the calls. But the friction between question and answer just disappeared.

The data was always there. The interface was the bottleneck.

Now the bottleneck is gone.

I connected my two week old (newborn) Big Players ad account to Claude using an MCP server I built based on Pipeboard's open-source code. Total time: 1 hour, but now it runs locally and does exactly what I need.

If you're not technical, you don't need to do any of that. Pipeboard handles the infrastructure. Setup takes about 5 minutes. OAuth and go.

Either way, the result is the same: you start asking questions. And each answer makes you want to ask another.

First, the basics.

"Show me my campaign performance for the last 30 days, sorted by cost per result."

What would've taken 10 minutes of clicking and exporting, done in 20 seconds. Clean breakdown. Sortable by whatever metric I wanted.

Fine. That's convenient. But convenience isn't the point.

Then I got curious.

"Which ad creatives have declining CTR compared to last week?"

This is the kind of question I'd never ask in Ads Manager. Not because it isn't valuable. Because it's too annoying to answer.

Claude flagged Founder 1 video man as trending down. Something I might have missed until the weekly review. Maybe longer.

That's when I realized: I wasn't just saving time. I was asking questions I'd trained myself to stop asking.

So I pushed it.

"Visualize my spend vs. ROAS by day of week for the last 60 days." (my example account is 2 weeks old so the 60 days should be a reference for more active accounts)

Custom visualization. On demand. No dashboard setup. No analyst ticket.

Turns out Wednesdays are crushing it and I've been bleeding money on Fridays where CPL is 50% higher.

Then I asked the question that actually matters.

"Based on this data, what should I test next week?"

Claude came back with creative variations for my founder 1 video man creative, doubling down on my 7 metrics fundraising post, and shifting budget from Fridays.

A strong starting point generated in 30 seconds from my actual data over 2 weeks.

Four questions. Maybe three minutes total. More insight than you’d get from the typical weekly review.

This is what it looks like when the interface stops being the bottleneck.

Two paths here depending on how technical you want to get.

If you want it running in 5 minutes:

The tool is called Pipeboard. It connects your Meta ad account directly to Claude. No code. No API keys. Just OAuth.

Roughly $45 million per month in ad spend flowing through the platform.

Works with Claude Pro or Max. If you're already paying for Claude, you're already paying for this capability.

Free tier to start. Paid plans if you need more.

If you want full control:

Pipeboard's code is open source. You can fork it, run it locally, customize it however you want. That's what I did. Takes more setup, but you own the whole stack.

One note: This is Meta-specific for now. I have TikTok and Google Ads integrations mapped out but earlier stage. If you're primarily a Meta shop, you can start today.

Once you're connected, steal these. They're the questions I asked in my first hour.

For immediate visibility:

For pattern recognition:

For strategic thinking:

You'll find your own threads to pull. That's the point.

The questions you stopped asking because they weren't worth the friction? Start asking them again.

We're watching the click-47-times era collapse in real time.

Right now, this is Meta. But the trajectory is clear.

Meta. Google Ads. TikTok. All connected. All conversational.

You wake up, open Claude, and ask: "How did all my paid channels perform yesterday? Compare them. Where should I shift budget?"

What used to require three browser tabs, two exports, and a 30-minute standup? Done in seconds. Omnichannel visibility. Plain English.

The interface was the bottleneck.

Now you can just ask.

Want to talk to your ads in 45 seconds? You can be set up in 5 minutes.

→ Pipeboard.co

And if you'd rather have someone build this for you, run it for your campaigns, and show you what your data is actually saying? That's what we're doing in 2026. 👇

🎁 Get rewarded for sharing! I’ve scraped and distilled every lesson from the entire AppMafia course (and built a custom AI trained on it all). This means you get the exact frameworks, insights, and viral strategies behind their $36M empire.

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