You are probably familiar with the option to connect Facebook pages you are admin of with Insights in order to get private statistics including impressions, reach and more. However, there is a different kind of private data connection available as well - Ad Analytics.
This allows you to connect an ad account associated with your Facebook page to get ad-related data such as spending, CTR, CPE and more. Check out our blog post to learn more about the Ad Analytics metrics we have available in Facelift Data Studio.
Connecting to Ad Analytics
To connect a Facebook page to Ad Analytics, go to the Profiles section then click on the 3 dots button to the top right of the page you wish to connect. From here, click on Activate Private Stats and choose Ad Campaigns in the new window.
Things to note:
This is separate from the Facebook Insights connection.
At the moment, only 1 ad account can be connected per page at a time.
If the ad account you connect is not actually one associated with the page, no data will show.
Understanding the ad creative types
As you can see in the Ads Creative Type Distribution, we distinguish between ads based on organic posts and ads based on dark posts.
Ads based on organic posts
These are ads generated when a public post is then boosted. Since these posts were public, you will also find them in the Own Posts Tables for both Facebook and Facebook Insights.
Ads based on dark posts
These are ads generated from dark posts, so they were never published publicly. Because of this, you won't find these posts in Facebook Own Posts Table. Further more, due to the nature of dark posts, the Facebook Insights API also does not make them available. To sum it up, ads based on dark posts can only be found in Facebook Ad Analytics metrics and not Facebook or Facebook Insights metrics.
Social metrics
You may notice that there are 2 variations of some fields such as spend vs social spend, reach vs social reach and clicks vs social clicks. The social value of a metric will always be less than or equal to the overall value, as social is simply a subcategory of the overall.
Social values are only counted when the ad is shown with social information, which shows other Facebook friends who engaged with the page or ad e.g. 'Jane Doe likes this'.
For example, if social spend is $40 and spend is $60, then $40 was spent on the ad with it showing social information and $20 was spent on the ad not showing social information. This brings you to the total spend of $60.
facebookAdsPostAds data source
If you work with the Metric Builder or our API, it is good to get an understanding of the Ad Analytics data source and its fields. facebookAdsPostAds shows post level data similar to the facebookOwnPosts and facebookInsightsOwnPosts data sources. It is possible to join facebookAdsPostAds with these other data sources using the 'postId' field.
You can find definitions of all available fields in our API Documentation under the 'Available data sources' tab.
It is important to communicate that connecting your pages to private level statistics in our tool does not give us access to any of your login details or privacy settings. You can find out more about this topic here.