Facebook Ads: Setup guide

This guide explains how to collect data from Facebook Ads.

Introduction

For a list of the fields that you can collect from Facebook Ads, see Facebook Ads.

This video guide explains how to create and configure a datastream to collect your ad performance data from Facebook Ads.

Prerequisites

Before you start collecting data from Facebook Ads, perform all of the following actions:

• Ensure that the account you use to connect to Facebook Ads has the correct roles and permissions to collect the data. Edit these roles and permissions in Facebook Business Manager. For more information, see the Facebook documentation.

• Add the Employee or higher business manager role to the account.

• For an ad account, add the View performance permission.

• Add the View Page performance permission to the classic page.

Depending on your specific configuration, the following additional permissions may be required:

• Leads Access or Manage Page: To access lead form results.

• Manage catalogue: To obtain metadata for advertised catalog objects.

• Manage line of business: To retrieve data specific for attribution reports.

Alternatively, if you do not use Facebook Business Manager, configure the roles and permissions on the page level. For more information, see the Facebook documentation.

Creating a datastream to collect data from Facebook Ads

The basics of creating a datastream to collect data from any data source are explained in our guide to Collecting data in Adverity. This guide contains information about the specific steps to create a datastream to fetch data from Facebook Ads.

Authorization: Allow Adverity to access Facebook Ads

1. If you choose Access using your credentials or Access using someone else’s credentials, in Set up or edit Ad Accounts, you or the person granting access must choose one of the following options:

   • Choose Grant access to all items, including those created in the future to give Adverity Ad Accounts to access all existing items and all items created in the future.

   • Choose Select specific items to which you want to grant access to only give Adverity Ad Accounts to access the selected items. Adverity will not automatically have access to items created in the future. You will need to grant Adverity access to any items created in the future.

   Warning

   If you use your credentials to grant Adverity access to Facebook Ads, all the items available to you using your credentials will be visible in the Authorizations page to all Adverity users with permission to edit this authorization.

   If someone else uses their credentials to grant Adverity access to Facebook Ads, the same applies to the items available using their credentials.

   This is important to consider if you do not want all Adverity users with permission to edit the authorization to be able to see the details of the authorization items. For more information about user permissions, see Managing user permissions.

Configuration: Choose the data you want to collect from Facebook Ads

Note

This connector reports data in the timezone of the authorized ad account.

To choose what data to collect and customize the Facebook Ads datastream configuration, follow these steps:

1. (Optional) Rename your datastream.

2. In Businesses, Accounts, and Campaigns, select the businesses, accounts, and campaigns for which to collect data. If you do not select any items in a drop-down list, Adverity collects data for all items in the drop-down list.

3. In Fields, change the list of fields that you want to see in your data extract.

   Note

   The actions, action_values, and conversions fields are group fields. This means that if you select one or more of these fields, and later select the Force action fields checkbox, this datastream will fetch all fields in the selected groups, even if the column is empty.

   This could mean that your data extract will contain lots of empty columns. If you only want to keep some of these columns, you can use the cut custom script instruction to choose which columns to keep.

   Alternatively, if you know which columns you want to include in your data extract, you can use the extendmissing custom script instruction to only add these columns. You can do this instead of using the Force action fields option.

   For more information about action fields, including a list of all fields you can collect by selecting these group fields, see the Facebook Ads documentation.

Note

For information on configuring other Facebook Ads fields, see Advanced Facebook Ads tips.

What’s next?

• Apply Data Mapping to your collected data to harmonize data collected from different sources in Adverity.

• Transform your data to meet your needs by creating and applying transformations to your datastream.

• Load your data into Explore & Present to visualize your data in Adverity.

• Load your data into an external destination of your choice.

Advanced Facebook Ads tips

Configuring advanced data collection options for Facebook Ads

This section explains the advanced configuration options for your Facebook Ads datastream. You can adjust these settings in the Configuration step of the datastream creation wizard.

In the General section of the page, adjust the following settings:

Breakdowns

Select how collected data is broken down in the data extract. For example, select age to view a breakdown of the age groups interacting with your ad campaigns.

Levels of granularity include: - Account - Campaign - Ad set - Ad

Further breakdowns include age, gender, country, publisher platform. These breakdowns are not all compatible with each other.

Action breakdowns

Select how collected data is broken down in the data extract in terms of actions on a campaign. For example, select action_reaction to view a breakdown by the number of reactions each campaign received.

Select actions (in fields) and action_type (in action breakdowns) for additional metrics.

Granularity

Select the time unit in which you want to collect data. Choose one of the following options:

• Total

• Monthly

• Daily

• Custom

Recommended setting: Time increment custom > number of days = 1 (unless you are fetching reach).

In the Media Screenshots section of the page, adjust the following settings:

Save media screenshots

To take screenshots of your ads, select this checkbox and populate Ad Preview fields below.

The screenshots are saved in the same storage as the Facebook Ads data extracts. For more information, see Setting up Storage for data extracts. The screenshots are stored until you delete them manually from the storage, or delete the Facebook Ads datastream.

Ad preview fields

To take screenshots of your ads, select at least one field that will contain the link to the screenshot.

(Recommended) Select ad_preview_default_url to generate a screenshot. For image thumbnails, use ad_preview_url.

To view advanced Facebook Ads datastream settings, click Show advanced settings and adjust the following settings:

Action attribution windows

An attribution window is the time period between a user clicking on or viewing an ad, and performing an action (such as a purchase or download) as a result of the ad click or view. In Action attribution window, select the time period for which to collect attribution data.

For each action selected in the Action breakdowns field, a column will be placed next to the action column in the data extract, displaying the number of actions that occurred within the selected action attribution window.

Pivot action fields

Select this checkbox to display action fields as rows instead of columns in the data extract. Each action is broken down by row, with the columns action_type and action_values. This setting only is only effective if you select an action in the Action breakdowns field.

Translate custom conversions

Select this checkbox to collect the names for custom conversions.

Force action fields

Select this checkbox to create a column for each possible action field for the action_type breakdown in the data extract, even if the action field is empty. By default, Facebook does not return empty values. This feature resolves destination issues where certain destinations may require a set number of columns to be loaded. For more information on action fields, see the Facebook documentation.

Include future campaigns

Select this checkbox to collect data on campaigns that have not run yet.

Adset targeting fields

Select the adset targeting fields to include in your data extract. Each selected adset targeting field will be displayed as a separate column in the data extract.

By default, the adset targeting fields are contained in a single JSON string. Adset targeting fields defines which fields from this JSON string will be included in the fetched data.

Product ID limit

Enter the maximum number of product IDs to be returned for each ad set for the product_id breakdown. For example, a carousel ad campaign may have up to five products included in the ad, each with its own product ID.

Custom Filter

To filter the data to collect from Facebook Ads, provide a set of filters in JSON format. For example, to find data with the ID 123, enter the following:

[{"field": "id", "operator": "EQUAL", "value": "123"}]

For more information on the parameters that can be filtered, see the Facebook documentation.