How Can I Ensure My Custom Report Matches the Report I See in Facebook?

Question

It's not possible to sync the data I want using Fivetran's prebuilt reports. How can I build a custom report that matches the report I see in Facebook?

Environment

Connector: Facebook Ads

Answer

If the data you want isn't available through our prebuilt reports, you can create a custom report to retrieve the same data you see in Facebook. To learn how to set up your custom report in Fivetran, see our Facebook Ads custom report setup guide.

To ensure your custom report matches the Facebook report, consider the following recommendations when configuring your report's breakdowns, action breakdowns, and fields.

Breakdowns

In the Breakdowns field, ensure the breakdowns you include match those in your Facebook report. For the list of available breakdowns, see our Custom reports breakdowns documentation.

Action breakdowns

In the Action Breakdowns field, ensure the list of possible action breakdowns you can include matches those available in your Facebook report, then include only those that match your selection. For the list of available action breakdowns, see our Custom reports action breakdowns documentation

NOTE: If you select an action breakdown and a field, we create separate tables for fields of the list<AdsActionStats> and list<AdsHistogramStats> types listed in Facebook's Insights API documentation.

Fields

The fields you select while setting up your custom report determine the query level. For more information, see our Facebook Ads query levels documentation.

To ensure your custom report matches your Facebook report, include the same fields to maintain the same reporting level.

Including fields related to metrics, conversions, and actions

Some fields related to metrics, conversions, and actions are only available with the action_type breakdown and can't be selected in the Fields selection while configuring your report. To see the fields related to metrics, conversions, and actions associated with the action_type breakdown, see Facebook Ads' Action Stats documentation.

To sync conversions and actions data, include the action_type field from the Action Breakdowns selection as well as the following fields:

• For conversions: conversions and actions from the Fields selection.
• For conversion values: conversion_values and action_values from the Fields selection. To avoid discrepancies, we recommend using a union of the two resulting child tables (e.g., <table_name>_conversions and <table_name>_actions).

For more information on this configuration and the output of this data, see our Conversions and actions documentation.

When you include the action_type field from the Action Breakdowns selection, we create a child table with an action_type column containing the applicable fields in the destination. For example, to see data for the landing_page_view metric, select the action_type field from Action Breakdowns and the actions field from Fields. You can find landing_page_view data in the <connector_schema_name>.<report_name>_actions table under the column action_type, where action_type=landing_page_view.