Facebook Ads is an advertising platform on Facebook that allows businesses to create and manage targeted ad campaigns. With extensive audience targeting options, ad formats, and analytics, it helps businesses reach their target audience, increase brand visibility, drive traffic, and achieve marketing objectives through effective ad placements on Facebook and its affiliated platforms.
Facebook Ads lets you create targeted adverts to reach different audiences and meet your business goals.
With Databox, your most important Facebook Ads KPIs will be transformed into meaningful insights and delivered to your mobile, Apple Watch, TV display or Slack channels. This will help you find out what’s working well, so you can maximize the impact of every post and ad.
Custom reports available with the use of Databox Metric Builder.
Learn more about the integrations
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The Omni Purchase metric encompasses purchases from all advertising channels.
In Metric Builder, under Actions/Action Values, you’ll find both Purchase and Purchases listed. Purchase represents a standard event that comes from mobile app events, while Purchases represents outcomes connected to Facebook Pixel conversions.
This distinction applies similarly to other action types like Add to Cart, Initiate Checkout, and Leads.
The ‘Estimated Ad Recallers’ metric (an estimate of the number of people who would remember seeing your ad within a two-day period) is only available for assets in the Brand awareness, Post engagement and Video views Objectives. To obtain results for this custom metric in Metric Builder for Facebook Ads, a selection of a dimension field (campaign or ad) is required. Otherwise, no value will be returned.
Due to technical limitations, it is not currently possible to breakdown Custom Conversions by Ad, Campaign, or other Dimensions using the Metric Builder for Facebook Ads (Pixels).
Due to technical limitations “Offline” conversions are currently not supported in Databox.
Due to technical limitations,”Offline” and “Mobile App” Pixels from Facebook Ads Pixel are currently not supported in Databox.
The ‘Media creatives’ feature is available for all Facebook Ads ‘by Ad’ basic dimensional metrics (for example – ‘Impressions by Ad’, ‘Amount Spent by Ad’, etc.). Feature is supported only on the ‘Table’ visualization. Supported metrics: Reach by Ad by Ad Impressions by Ad Amount Spent by Ad Frequency by Ad CPP by Ad CPM by Ad Post Reactions by Ad Post Comments by Ad Post Shares by Ad Link Clicks by Ad Page Likes by Ad Clicks (All) by Ad CTR (All) by Ad CPC (All) by Ad CTR (Link Click-Through Rate) by Ad Leads by Ad Purchase ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) by Ad Purchases by Ad Purchases Conversion Value by Ad App Installs by Ad Cost Per App Install by Ad Adds to Cart by Ad Adds to Cart Conversion Value by Ad
A number of metrics for the Facebook Ads integration are Non-Aggregatable (this includes corresponding dimensions by Campaign, by Ad or by Ad Set). This means that due to the nature of these metrics, summing together daily/weekly/monthly values will not give correct total results for longer time periods. These metrics are:
No-reset metrics (metrics that are not reset to value 0 with every new day) for the Facebook Ads integration (including the corresponding dimension by Campaign, by AdSet, and by Ad) are:
Unlike the Metric Builder Pixels tab, which retrieves data from the Events Manager in Facebook Ads, custom conversions shown in the ‘Results’ section can be retrieved via the Metric Builder ‘Ads Reporting’ tab. In Metric Builder, this can be accessed by selecting ‘Actions’ in the ‘Metric’ field > ‘Custom Conversions defined by the advertiser’ in the ‘Action Type’ field.
Each Custom Conversion defined by the advertiser will have a unique ID assigned, which is linked to a specific conversion event. To find the ID associated with the conversion event you want to report on, go to the Events Manager/Custom Conversions tab, where the ID will be displayed alongside the custom conversion name.
When Databox retrieves campaign data through Facebook API, it assigns each campaign a unique trailing ID number. This distinction helps prevent campaign duplicates within Databox. When setting up filters in Metric Builder to refine data based on campaign names, this ID should not be applied. Pasting the ID in the filter will lead to an empty data preview. Therefore, when working with filters to include or exclude campaigns (as well as Ads or Ad Sets), ensure you only input the actual campaign names without the ID.
Due to an API limitation Custom Metrics built using the Metric Builder for Facebook Ads (Pixels) will have 28 days of historical data available from the time when the metric is created/used in your account. Over time, as data continues to sync, it will accumulate for longer periods (Date Ranges).
Renaming Campaigns, Ads or similar entities in Facebook Ads will result in Databox recognizing the new name as a separate Campaign, Ad, etc. This means that previously synced data in Databox will not be automatically updated to the new name. Instead, the renaming can result in duplicated values for metrics grouped by campaigns, as well as for standard (non-dimensional) metrics.
If the selected Date Range includes the period when the old naming was in use for a dimension in the Data Source, both the old and the new versions/names of the same dimension (Campaign, Ad, etc.) will be displayed in Databox as two separate entities.
This behavior is expected because the Databox system accumulates data over time. To address this issue, consider using the ‘Purge Data Source’ option, which clears previously accumulated data and syncs the latest data, BUT keep in mind that purging a Data Source can result in loss of important historical data.
Facebook allows users to visualize data on a campaign/ad set/ad level even when multiple attributions are used, however, the total value across all of them will not be shown to the user.
This is the case for both native and custom reports in Facebook Ads Manager. This behavior only affects ‘outcome’ metrics, i.e. those that show up under the Results column in Facebook Ads, including Purchases (or are calculated using one of those metrics, e.g. Cost per Purchase).
For users who want to report on data that uses multiple attribution settings across campaigns/ad sets/ads, the Metric Builder can be used to pull in the metric values using the appropriate attribution settings. Otherwise, the values displayed in Databox are retrieved from the API with a unified attribution setting applied. These values in Databox will likely not match values in Facebook Manager, since they are calculated in different ways.
Facebook Ads display 25 hours within one day, which can lead to data inconsistencies when comparing data from FB Ads to data in Databox, where the same timeframe is limited to 24 hours. This means that a discrepancy can be observed in Databox, even though the data is accurate, due to the particularities of how the Event Manager charts display and aggregate the numbers.
The availability of daily values in Databox will differ depending on the option chosen in the metric selector for Pixels.
For Custom Conversions, only the aggregated total value for the selected Date Range is pulled into Databox, meaning detailed values for sub-periods like daily or hourly periods will not be available. On the other hand, Events Received provides granular values down to the hour, enabling aggregation into larger time frames such as daily or weekly.
When reporting on Campaign metrics from Facebook Ads, such as Spent, Impressions, and CTR per Campaign, the displayed campaigns will include both the campaign name and a unique ID number. This is intentional and cannot be removed. The purpose is to distinguish potential duplicates – campaigns that share the same name in Facebook—by using a unique ID to identify them. Without this differentiation, attempting to retrieve data for multiple campaigns with identical names would lead to errors.
Facebook Data Sources may get disconnected in Databox with the error message ‘We cannot make Facebook API calls on your behalf, since you’ve changed password or Facebook has revoked permissions for security reasons. Please re-authorise your Facebook account.’, even if the password has not been changed on the Facebook account.
This is a result of how Facebook is handling potential security issues, for example, if users from different geolocations log into the same account or if different devices are used to access the account. In such cases, Facebook may invalidate access token before it officially expires. References from Facebook forums where users discussed such behavior:
This is expected behaviour deriving from Facebook’s security measures. Databox is not able to assist in such scenarios, but here are some steps that can be taken:
Steps you can take within Databox if your Facebook Data Source gets disconnected with the error message ‘We cannot make Facebook API calls on your behalf, since you’ve changed password or Facebook has revoked permissions for security reasons. Please re-authorise your Facebook account.’:
These steps might be effective in some cases.