Facebook Ads: Setup guide

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?#

Troubleshooting Facebook Ads#

The status of a campaign, ad set or ad is not correct when fetching data from Facebook Ads#

If the status of an object is incorrect, for example if an ad is inactive but its status is shown as active when fetching data for a long date range, this is because the metadata for the authorization used in this datastream is out of date.

To resolve this issue, follow the steps in Synchronizing metadata for the authorization used in this datastream.

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