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activecampaignr

A tidy, cached, and MCP-ready R client for the ActiveCampaign API v3.

Documentation: pcstrategyandopsco.github.io/activecampaignr

Overview

activecampaignr gives R users direct analytic access to their ActiveCampaign CRM. Pull your full deal pipeline into a tibble, join custom fields in wide format, and feed the result straight into dplyr, ggplot2, or Shiny without writing a single API call by hand. Built-in caching means repeated analysis runs hit disk instead of the API, and incremental sync keeps your local data current without re-fetching everything.

The dataframes are correctly typed, and a number of convenience functions are included to make it easier to join data and perform analysis.

Typical use cases:

  • Pipeline analytics — win rates by owner, stage, pathway, or time period; funnel conversion rates; deal velocity (days per stage)
  • Contact enrichment — merge CRM contacts with external data via email or phone, with NZ/AU phone normalization built in
  • Campaign performance — open rates, click rates, and revenue attribution across campaigns
  • Custom field analysis — pivot ActiveCampaign’s long-format custom fields into one-row-per-deal wide format ready for modelling or reporting
  • Automated reporting — combine with officer for PowerPoint/Word reports or Shiny for interactive dashboards
  • AI-assisted CRM queries — expose your pipeline as MCP tools so AI assistants can answer natural language questions about your deals and contacts

Features

Feature Detail
Tidy outputs All functions return tibbles with snake_case columns
Automatic pagination Fetch thousands of records without manual page handling
Rate limiting & retry Built-in throttling (4 req/sec) and exponential backoff
RDS caching Incremental sync fetches only recent changes
Full CRUD Read, create, update, delete for deals, contacts, tags, and more
Custom fields Wide-format pivot, one row per entity, one column per field
MCP server Expose your CRM as tools for AI assistants via mcptools
NZ/AU phone normalization Standardize phone numbers for matching

Installation 

# Install from GitHub
# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("pcstrategyandopsco/activecampaignr")

Quick Start 

library(activecampaignr)

# Authenticate
ac_auth(
  url = "https://yourname.api-us1.com",
  api_key = "your-api-key"
)
# Or: ac_auth_from_env()  # reads ACTIVECAMPAIGN_URL + ACTIVECAMPAIGN_API_KEY

# Fetch deals
deals <- ac_deals()
won_deals <- ac_deals(status = 1)

# Custom fields in wide format
cf <- ac_deal_custom_fields_wide()

# Incremental sync with caching
result <- ac_sync_deals()
deals <- result$deals

Vignettes

Vignette Description
Getting Started Auth, first API call, caching
Caching and Sync Incremental sync, parallel with future
MCP Integration AI assistant tool setup
Pipeline Analysis Win rates, velocity, PowerPoint reports
Ad Effectiveness CPL, CPS, velocity, windowed attribution
Shiny Deal Dashboard Interactive deal explorer
Campaign ROI Campaign performance Word report

Why This Package?

This package builds on the foundation laid by ractivecampaign, which pioneered R access to the ActiveCampaign API. I’m grateful for that work. It proved the value of an R-native AC client and informed many of the patterns used here.

However, production use at scale revealed gaps that warranted a ground-up rebuild:

Capability Detail
Broader API coverage ractivecampaign covers deals and contacts; production CRM pipelines need accounts, campaigns, tasks, tags, lists, automations, and webhooks
Automatic pagination Fetching thousands of records shouldn’t require manual offset loops
Caching and incremental sync Repeated API calls for unchanged data waste time and hit rate limits; this package caches to RDS and only fetches recent changes
Modern HTTP backend Built on httr2 with native rate limiting (req_throttle) and retry with exponential backoff (req_retry), replacing manual Sys.sleep() and retry() calls
Custom field pivot ActiveCampaign stores custom fields in long format (one row per field); this package provides wide format out of the box (one row per entity, one column per field)
MCP integration Expose your CRM as tools for AI assistants via mcptools, enabling natural language queries against your deal and contact data
Write operations Full CRUD (create, read, update, delete) for all entities, not just read

Acknowledgements

This package was inspired by and builds on the work of ractivecampaign. Thank you for making ActiveCampaign accessible to the R community.

License

MIT