Why Do Facebook Ads Custom Reports Show Inaccurate Dates and Duplicate Rows?

Question

Why do my Facebook Ads custom reports show duplicate rows with different or inaccurate dates when I use Lifetime aggregation?

Environment

Connector: Facebook Ads

Answer

When you select Lifetime as the aggregation for a Facebook Ads custom report, the date column may not represent the campaign start date. Instead, it may reflect a technical date returned by Facebook, such as the earliest queryable date or the maximum reporting range date.

Fivetran stores separate rows when Facebook returns Lifetime data with different date anchors or when campaign configuration changes over time. This is because the primary key for each row includes _fivetran_id, date, and any breakdown columns.

To avoid confusion:

1. Update your custom report to use Day aggregation if you need one row per calendar day.
2. Use Lifetime aggregation if you need current lifetime totals, but treat the date column as a technical field rather than the campaign start date.
3. For analysis, use the row with the latest date for each campaign to focus on the current lifetime aggregate.

Duplicate rows across different dates may each contribute to Monthly Active Rows (MAR), which can increase usage costs. Filtering to the latest date helps with reporting but does not remove the MAR impact of previously stored rows.