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    Facebook Ads
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    Facebook Ads

    • 7 Minutes to read
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    Article summary

    Facebook Ads is an advertising platform that allows businesses and individuals to create and manage targeted advertising campaigns on Facebook. It offers a range of tools and features for audience targeting, ad creation, and performance tracking to help businesses reach their desired audiences and achieve their advertising goals.

    Refer to this page to see all available endpoints from the Facebook Ads API.

    If you have multiple Facebook Ads accounts and would like to extract the same data from all of them, it's possible through multi-account extraction. Contact our Solutions team to enable this feature.

    Authorize Connection to Facebook Ads

    To authorize this service, use OAuth 2.0 to share specific data with Dataddo while keeping usernames, passwords, and other information private.

    1. On the Authorizers page, click on Authorize New Service and select your service.
    2. Follow the on-screen prompts to grant Dataddo the necessary permissions to access and retrieve your data.
    3. [Optional] Once your authorizer is created, click on it to change the label for easier identification.

    Ensure that the account you're granting access to holds at least admin-level permissions. If necessary, assign a team member with the required permissions with the authorizer role to authenticate the service for you.

    The best practice is to create a dedicated Admin System User in Facebook Business Manager. For more details, refer to the official Facebook documentation for further details.

    For more information, see our article on authorizers.

    How to Create a Facebook Ads Data Source

    1. On the Sources page, click on the Create Source button and select the connector from the list.
    2. From the drop-down menu, choose your authorizer.
      Didn't find your authorizer?

      Click on Add new Account at the bottom of the drop-down and follow the on-screen prompts. You can also go to the Authorizers tab and click on Add New Service.

    3. Name your data source and select your metrics and attributes.
    4. [Optional] Configure your advanced settings. If you are unsure about how to proceed, we recommend skipping this step.
    5. Configure your sync frequency or set the exact synchronization time under Show advanced settings.
      DATADDO TIP

      If you need to load historical data, refer to the Data Backfilling article.

    6. Preview your data by clicking on the Test Data button in the top right corner. You can adjust the date range for a more specific time frame.
    7. Click on Save and congratulations, your new data source is ready!

    Limitations

    Number of Rows

    Under normal circumstances, the Facebook Ads API sets a hard limit on the total number of rows that can be extracted per call.

    To overcome this limitation, Dataddo supports automatic pagination to make multiple calls and retrieve all your data.

    Number of Metrics

    The Facebook Ads API allows you to select up to 200 metrics per source.

    Attributes Selection

    You can select Facebook Ads attributes based on the reporting level.
    The reporting level is a hierarchy-type report:

    • 1st level: Account
    • 2nd level: Campaign
    • 3rd level: Adset
    • 4th level: Ad

    Find more information in Facebook's official documentation.

    Historical Data Limitation

    The Facebook Ads API has two limitations for historical data:

    • You may load up to 90 days per extraction batch.
    • In total, you may extract up to 36 months of historical data.

    For more information, refer to our guide for data backfilling.

    Limited Data Breakdown Combinations

    Due to the Facebook Ads API, not all data insight breakdown combinations are viable. Dataddo offers a list of all possible combinations what are supported and won't cause issues for your data source.

    Refer to Facebook's official documentation for the list of possible data insight breakdown combinations.

    However, if you require a combination that is supported but not available in Dataddo, please contact our Solutions team.

    Using Audience Breakdowns

    Using both demographic and geographical dimensions to to break down the metrics according to the audience categories might lead to data discrepancies.

    This is caused by underlying calculations which are based on data sampling. As such, while the data will have correct percentage values, the absolute values can be distorted.

    Troubleshooting

    Data Preview Unavailable

    No data preview when you click on Test Data might be caused by an issue with your source configuration. The most common causes are:

    • Date range: Try a smaller date range. You can load the rest of your data afterward using manual data load.
    • Insufficient permissions: Please make sure your authorized account has at least admin-level permissions.
    • Invalid metrics, attributes, or breakdowns: You may not have any data for the selected metrics, attributes, or breakdowns.
    • Incompatible combination of metrics, attributes, or breakdowns: Your selected combination cannot be queried together. Please refer to the service's documentation to view a full list of metrics that can be included in the same data source.

    Authorization Error

    If your Facebook source is broken, check the extraction log to see the details of the issue.

    1. Go to Sources, click on the three dots and choose Test Extraction.
    2. For the following error messages, reauthorize the service (Facebook).
      "response_status": "401 Unauthorized"

      "Www-Authenticate": "OAuth \"Facebook Platform\" \"invalid_token\" \"You cannot access the app till you log in to www.facebook.com and follow the instructions given.\""

      "response_body": "{\"error\":{\"message\":\"You cannot access the app till you log in to www.facebook.com and follow the instructions given.\",\"type\":\"OAuthException\",\"code\":190,\"error_data\":\"{\\\"checkpoint_url\\\":\\\"https:\\\\\\/\\\\\\/www.facebook.com\\\"}\",\"error_subcode\":459,\"fbtrace_id\":\"AUWZQsg7Opr7SEpp_lk9wUa\"}}"
    3. Restart the broken sources by clicking on the Manual Data Load icon next to your source.
      Facebook - authorization error log 2

    Unable to Find Facebook Sub Accounts

    If your access rights have changed or you gained access to a new Facebook account, it's possible that your other accounts will not be immediately listed in Dataddo. To fix this, please try the following:

    Fully Reauthorize the Service

    1. Go to the Authorizers tab in Dataddo and delete the Facebook authorizer.
      Deleting an Authorizer

      Please keep in mind that you will first need to delete all sources created with the authorizer. This will also affect your flows.

    2. Go to your Facebook settings and navigate to the Business integrations tab.
    3. Find Dataddo and click on Remove.
    4. Now, go back to the Authorizers tab in Dataddo and authorize your Facebook account again.

    Check Your Account Permissions
    If the method above doesn't work, please check your Facebook account's permissions. To access insights, make sure the permissions are at least on the analyst/admin level.

    Metric and Ad Recall Data Don't Match

    The Reach and Recall metrics cannot be summed to get the totals for longer time periods. As these metrics measure the daily unique users who view your ad (= reach) or will remember the ad (=ad recall), it is not possible to get data for a specific time period and/or aggregate the data.

    To avoid this, you can

    1. Get daily breakdowns: The daily values will match, but not when summed up over a longer time period.
    2. Extract data weekly or monthly: These weekly/monthly values will match.

    Simply create a new source and a new flow with the particular breakdown (for example, a source and a flow with daily breakdowns/synchronizations).

    Read more about the metrics, and why the data may not be matching here.

    Show Image Asset URL as an Image

    To have Image Asset URLs show as images in your destination,

    1. During data source creation, go to Advanced settings.
    2. Select the Image Asset breakdown.
      Facebook Ads - Image Asset
    3. These columns will be added to your table: Image Asset ID, Image Asset Hash, Image Asset Name, and Image Asset URL.
    4. In your destination (e.g. Looker Studio), change the URL type of the Image Asset URL field to image .
      Facebook Ads - Image Asset URL in Looker

    Related Articles

    Now that you have successfully created a data source, see how you can connect your data to a dashboarding app or a data storage.

    Sending Data to Dashboarding Apps

    Sending Data to Data Storages

    Other Resources

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