Facebook Ads
- 6 Minutes to read
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Facebook Ads
- 6 Minutes to read
- DarkLight
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.
Dataddo can extract all the metrics provided via Facebook's official API. The full list is available here.
How to Create a Facebook Ads Data Source
- Under the Sources tab, click on the Create Source button and select the connector from the list.
- From the drop-down menu, choose your account.Didn't find your account?
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.
- Name your data source and select your metrics and attributes.
- [Optional] Configure your advanced settings (for more information please refer to the section on Advanced Settings). If you are unsure about how to proceed, we recommend skipping this step.
- Configure your snapshotting preferences. Choose your sync frequency or the exact synchronization time under Show advanced settings.DATADDO TIP
If you need to load historical data, please refer to the Manual Data Load page.
- 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.
- Click on Save and congratulations, your new data source is ready!
Connector Overview
Permissions
To access the ads in your Facebook account, it is necessary for the authorized account to have permissions on at least Analyst level.
The best practice is to create a dedicated System User within Facebook Business Manager. For more details, please refer to the Facebook official documentation for further details.
Multi-Account Extraction
The Dataddo Facebook Ads connector supports automatic extraction from all available Facebook Ads accounts. This feature is particularly useful when you have multiple ads accounts and need to automatically extract the same metrics and dimensions across all ads accounts.
Using Audience Breakdowns
The Dataddo Facebook Ads connector allows the use of both demographic and geographical dimensions to break down the metrics according to the audience categories. Because the underlying calculations for these dimensions are based on data samples, we highly recommend isolating them into separate data sources. Due to the calculation mechanism, the data with the audience dimensions are proportionally correct, however, the absolute values may be distorted.
Limitations
Number of Rows
The Facebook Ads API has a hard limit for the total number of rows that can be extracted per call. However, Dataddo supports automatic pagination, meaning Dataddo will make multiple calls to the Facebook API in order to retrieve all of your data.
Number of Metrics
You can select up to 200 metrics per source. and attributes depend on the reporting level that you select. More information can be found in Facebook's official documentation.
The reporting level is a hierarchy-type report:
- 1st level - Account
- 2nd level - Campaign
- 3rd level - Adset
- 4th level - Ad
Historical Data Load
The Facebook Ads API limits historical data loads to 90 days. For historic data beyond 90 days, change the date range and load in batches of 90 days. For more information, on how to load the data, check our guide. The Facebook Ads API limits the total historical data load to the last 36 months.Historical Data Load
Limited Data Breakdown Combinations
In Dataddo, there is a list of all possible data insight breakdown combinations available for you to choose from. It is not possible to choose freely as there is a risk of choosing a combination that is not supported by the Facebook Ads API leading to a broken source.
You can find the full list of possible combinations in Facebook's official documentation.
However, if you require a combination that is supported but not available in Dataddo, let us know and we will promptly add it.
Troubleshooting
Data Preview Unavailable
If there is no data preview after clicking on Test Data, there might be a problem 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 through our manual data load function.
- 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: The combination you have selected 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 source.
Authorization Error
If your Facebook source is broken, check the extraction log to see the details of the issue.
- Go to Sources, click on the three dots and choose Test Extraction.
- If the error message is one of the following, go to Authorizers to 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\"}}" - Restart the broken sources by clicking on Manual Data Load icon next to your source.
Unable to Find Facebook Sub Accounts
If your access rights have changed or you gained access to a new Facebook account, it is possible that your other accounts will not be immediately listed in Dataddo. To fix this, please try the following:
Completely Reauthorize the Service
- 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.
- Go to your Facebook settings and navigate to the Business integrations tab.
- Find Dataddo and click on Remove.
- 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 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
- Get daily breakdowns: The daily values will match, but not when summed up over a longer time period.
- 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.
Get Image Asset URL to Show as An Image
When creating your source, use breakdown called Image Asset under Advanced Settings.
As a result, you will have Image Asset ID, Image Asset Hash, Image Asset Name, and Image Asset URL columns available. In order for the Image Asset URL to show up as an image, you can, for example, change the URL type to image in your Looker Studio.
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