Marketing API Sandbox capability now re-enabled

We are excited to share that we have brought back Marketing API Sandbox Ad Accounts, a way for developers to test their APIs against the Marketing API.

What is a Marketing API Sandbox Ad Account?

The Marketing API Sandbox Ad Account is a testing ad account associated with an app and configured from developer.facebook.com to allow for API access to a subset of Marketing APIs. The API Sandbox account lets developers call Marketing APIs on their pages and assets for testing, without actually delivering the ads themselves. Developers do not need to set up a funding source for ad accounts, since Meta will not deliver the ads created and impressions or spend will not be accumulated.

How do I create a Marketing API Sandbox Ad Account?

To create a Marketing API Sandbox Ad account, users must first enable the Marketing API product in their app dashboard, and then create & link a Sandbox Ad account to it. The user can further choose to configure the Sandbox Ad account by linking it to business managers, accepting terms of services, etc. When configuration is done the user can generate the user access token or use the system user token to query the Graph API for testing purposes.

End User Experience

1. Developers can visit their app dashboard and add the Marketing API product in https://developers.facebook.com/.
   • Click the My Apps dropdown
   • Choose an app that you have Administrator or Developer Access to
2. Add Marketing API product if you don’t have access to this product before
   • In App Dashboard, go to the "Add a product" section and set up Marketing API
   
3. Clicking "Marketing API > Tools" will take you to the sandbox ad account management card.
4. You will see the option to create a sandbox account if its the first time you are creating one. Note that you can only have one sandbox account per app.
5. You can then link this sandbox ad account to any page that you have admin access to.
6. For the basic use case, you can now generate the user access tokens that have ad account and page access, and can start testing Marketing API calls with this access token.
7. If you are planning on using features such as Instant Experience and catalogs management, we highly recommend using a system user token instead of user access token. To get the system user access token, click the button "Connect To Business" and use Business Manager to retrieve the access token.

Limitations

• Sandbox ad accounts cannot be operated from within Ads Manager directly. They can only be operated via Ads API calls
• Insights API is currently not supported because changes in the sandbox environment do not go live and get served. So no spend, clicks or impressions are generated and there are no insights to be evaluated
• If your app is currently allowlisted for access to certain experimental API's, you will also be able to call those APIs in Sandbox mode
• You can create only one Sandbox ad account per app regardless of the access tier that your app is in

Resources:

• Developer Documentation

• General Marketing API documentation for how to test

• Blog post from initial launch (2017)