The campaign detail is the screen where you can see in one place how much the campaign cost and what it delivered, both for all networks together and for each one separately. Open it whenever you need to know how a campaign is doing, or when you are putting together materials for a client or for management. This article goes through the detail from top to bottom and explains what each number means and how to read it.
Before you start
For the detail to show any numbers, several things have to be true at the same time:
- The campaign is created in gas and has a Hashtag filled in. gas uses the hashtag to recognise which ad campaigns, posts and videos on the individual platforms belong to this campaign. Creating a campaign is described in the article Creating a campaign.
- The networks whose numbers you want to see are linked, and their profiles and ad accounts are connected to your customer account.
- In the names of ad campaigns on the platforms and in the text of posts, the hashtag is written exactly as it appears in gas, including the hash sign at the beginning.
- Your plan includes the campaigns module.
Every member of the customer account may view the campaign detail, including the Viewer role. The User and Administrator roles may edit the campaign.
How to open the detail
- In the left menu, click Campaigns.
- In the table, click the campaign name.
- The detail opens. The header shows the campaign name and, right after it in small type, its hashtag.
On the right side of the detail header there is a refresh button, a button with a printer icon (on a computer) and a button with a pencil icon, which you use to edit the campaign.
Basic campaign details
The first card summarises what you filled in about the campaign:
- Campaign name and Hashtag, which is used to match the data.
- UTM campaign is the parameter used to assign website traffic from Google Analytics to the campaign. If you have not filled it in, it says "Not set" here and the Website rows stay at zero throughout the whole detail.
- Campaign start, Campaign end and Campaign duration in days. Only what happened on the platforms within this period counts towards the campaign.
- Last update time tells you when gas last recalculated the numbers for this campaign. When it says "never", the campaign has not been processed even once yet and all numbers will be zero.
Budget and spending
The second card answers the question of how much of the budget has been spent.
Budget is the amount you entered manually when creating the campaign. It is entered in CZK and without VAT. gas does not take it from anywhere, so it matches exactly what you typed into the field.
Spend is the sum of the five rows below it:
- Meta Ads: the spend of ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.
- Google Ads: the spend of campaigns in Google Ads.
- Ad campaigns: the spend of ad campaigns on Pinterest.
- Sklik: the spend of campaigns in Sklik.
- Custom measurement: the price you filled in for the custom measurements belonging to this campaign. A custom measurement is not tied to the campaign by a hashtag, but directly by choosing the campaign in its own form.
The Remaining row is the difference between the budget and the spend. As soon as the campaign spends more than the budget, it turns negative.
The circle on the right shows spending as a percentage, that is, the share of the budget that has been spent:
- A green circle means the spend still fits within the budget.
- A red circle means the spend has exceeded the budget. The percentage is higher than one hundred and the Remaining row is negative.
- A grey circle labelled "budget not set" means the campaign has a budget of zero, so the percentage cannot be calculated. If no budget was filled in at all, the circle is not displayed and the budget shows 0 CZK.
Spending above one hundred per cent does not in itself mean there is an error in the data. Most often it means one of three things: the budget was entered for only some of the networks, while the hashtag also picked up others; the budget is without VAT, whereas the amounts for some payments include VAT; or the ad account is not kept in CZK (see the warning below). Zero spending, on the other hand, means that gas found no paid campaign with the hashtag for this campaign, or that the campaign has not been recalculated even once yet.
All amounts in the detail are labelled as CZK, but gas takes them over exactly as the relevant ad account reports them. Sklik always bills in CZK. However, a Meta, Google Ads or Pinterest ad account may be kept in euros or dollars, and then an amount in a foreign currency ends up in the total even though it is labelled as CZK. Different currencies are therefore added together. With such an account, treat the total spend and the budget spending as indicative and compare the trend over time rather than the absolute amount. How gas works with currencies in the other parts of the application is described in the article Currency and conversion of spend.
Reach: how many people the campaign reached
Two metrics in gas have names that are easy to mix up. Reach is an estimate of the number of people who saw the content. Impressions is the number of times the content was displayed, even if it was shown repeatedly to a single person. Reach is therefore always a smaller number than impressions.
The value in the Reach card is shown with a ~ sign (approximately) and this is deliberate. Reach simply cannot be added up honestly across networks.
Each platform counts reach in its own way and only counts itself. Meta knows how many people it showed the ad to in its own apps, Instagram counts the reach of individual posts, Google Analytics counts unique website visitors. None of them knows that the same person also saw the other ad. The sum of these numbers is therefore not the number of people actually reached, but an upper estimate: anyone who came across your campaign both on Facebook and on Instagram is counted twice. The note under the card points this out as well and states that the number of people reached was very probably lower.
The breakdown under the heading shows where the reach comes from, and it already makes clear that the individual rows are not quantities counted the same way:
- Meta Ads: gas loads this value live from the ad account, because it cannot be assembled from daily numbers. It is the number of people with repetitions removed, but only within a single ad account. When you have several accounts, their reach figures are added together and the overlap between them is not deducted.
- Instagram posts and Instagram stories: here you see the average reach of one post or story, not the total for all of them. If they were added up, every person who saw several of your posts would appear in the number several times.
- Website: the number of website visitors that Google Analytics assigned to the value in the UTM campaign field.
- Custom measurement: the number of different people recorded by your custom measurements assigned to the campaign.
Sklik and Google Ads are not in the breakdown at all. Neither of these platforms provides data on the number of people reached, so they do not contribute to reach. Read their performance in impressions and clicks.
Impressions, Clicks and Engagement rate
Impressions is the number of times content was displayed, and this can be added up, because it is not about people. The breakdown contains Meta Ads, Facebook posts, Instagram posts, Instagram stories, Google Ads, Website (website pages viewed), Custom measurement, YouTube (video views), TikTok, Pinterest and Sklik. Networks with nothing belonging to the campaign show zero.
Clicks summarises clicks from Custom measurement, Google Ads, Sklik, Meta Ads, Facebook posts and Pinterest. Here too, every platform measures clicks a little differently (for example a click-through to a link versus any click in the ad), so the total is suitable for following the trend, not for comparing networks with each other precisely. The terms are explained in the article Glossary of metrics.
Engagement rate is displayed only when there is something to calculate it from. It is the average of the engagement rates of the individual sources (Facebook ad accounts and posts, Instagram posts and stories, TikTok, Pinterest and custom measurements), not a ratio calculated from the campaign totals. It will therefore not equal the engagement rate you see for an individual network.
Tables for individual networks
The lower part of the detail contains a strip of tabs. Each one holds a table of the specific items that gas assigned to the campaign: Facebook (Posts and Events), Instagram (Posts and Stories), Meta Ads, TikTok, Pinterest, Pinterest Ads, Google Ads, Sklik, YouTube and Custom measurement.
All tabs are always there, even for networks you do not use. If a network is not linked or there is nothing in it that belongs to the campaign, the table is empty.
You work with the tables the same way as elsewhere in gas: they can be sorted by clicking the column header and you can choose and move the columns. The last row, labelled Summary with a number in brackets, is the total for the whole table and the number of items in it. In the External link column, the open link leads directly to the campaign, post or video on the given platform, so you can verify the numbers at the source right away. This is described in more detail in the article Working with tables.
Printing and saving to PDF
On a computer, the detail header contains a button with a printer icon; the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on Mac computers) does the same thing.
The tables of the individual networks are normally loaded only when you click the tab. Before printing, gas therefore has to load them all at once so that nothing is missing from the output. A Preparing data for printing window appears and, depending on the size of the campaign and the speed of your computer, the preparation may take a while. When it finishes, the browser print window opens, where you can choose to save to PDF instead of printing. You can stop the preparation at any time with the Cancel button.
How often the numbers change
The numbers are not calculated by the browser at the moment you open the page. gas recalculates them in the background roughly once an hour and the detail shows the result of the last recalculation. You can see when it happened under Last update time. An open page refreshes itself as soon as a new recalculation is due, and you can request one at any time with the refresh button in the header.
The spend of the individual ad networks is refreshed together with the data download for that network, not with the hourly campaign recalculation: for Meta Ads and Pinterest several times a day, for Google Ads roughly once an hour, for Sklik once a day. The spend can therefore be somewhat older than the other campaign numbers.
Some campaigns stop being recalculated, which is normal:
- A campaign whose Campaign start is in the future starts being calculated only on that day.
- A finished campaign keeps being calculated for about two more days and then its numbers settle.
- A campaign that started more than three years ago is no longer recalculated and its numbers stay frozen.
Common problems
The detail is empty, everything is zero
Look at Last update time and check whether it says "never". In that case the campaign has not been processed even once and the numbers will appear after the next recalculation, that is, within about an hour. If there is a date and the numbers are still zero, the matching by hashtag does not fit; see the next point.
The campaign has not started yet and nothing is loading
A campaign starts being calculated only on the day filled in as Campaign start, so until then the detail stays empty. If the campaign is in fact already running, open the campaign for editing with the pencil button and correct the date.
One network shows zero in the breakdown even though the campaign ran there
The most common cause is a hashtag that is not written on the platform the same way as in gas. Go through this list:
- Compare the hashtag shown in the campaign detail with the name of the ad campaign on the platform. It has to be contained in it exactly as it is in gas, including the hash sign at the beginning.
- For posts, videos and pins, the hashtag in the text must either end the whole text or be followed by a space. A period, comma or exclamation mark right after the hashtag breaks the matching.
- The post, video or pin must be published within the campaign period. For ad campaigns it is enough that their period overlaps with the campaign period.
- The profile or ad account must be connected to this customer account in Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts.
- After making the correction, wait for the next recalculation, that is, about an hour, and refresh the page.
Note that renaming an ad campaign on the platform only takes effect after the next data download for that network, which can be a matter of several hours.
The Website rows are zero
Website traffic is assigned to the campaign by the UTM campaign field, not by the hashtag. If the basic details show "Not set" for this item, fill it in when editing the campaign. It has to match the value you have in the campaign links, and a property has to be connected in Google Analytics.
Spending is above one hundred per cent
The spend has exceeded the budget you entered. Check the spend breakdown by network: often you will find a network you did not take into account when entering the budget, but whose campaigns carry the same hashtag. Other common explanations are VAT (the budget is entered without tax) and an ad account kept in a foreign currency. If the numbers are correct and only the budget is out of date, change it when editing the campaign.
Spending is zero even though the campaign is running
It means that gas found no paid campaign with the hashtag. Follow the point "One network shows zero in the breakdown". As a reminder, spend is refreshed only a few times a day for some networks and once a day for Sklik, so for a freshly launched campaign it may stay at zero for a while even when impressions and clicks are already loading.
The spend does not match the number I see in the network itself
If the ad account is kept in a foreign currency, this difference is expected. In the sections of the individual networks (Meta Ads, Google Ads) the spend is converted to CZK, whereas the top card of the campaign detail shows the amount as the ad account reported it. For the same reason, the amount in the top card may differ from the amount in the Meta Ads tab in the lower part of the detail. The difference can also be caused by VAT, by day boundaries in a different time zone, and by the fact that platforms keep adjusting their data for several days afterwards.
The reach comes out higher than the number of people we could realistically have reached
That is a property of the sum, not an error. Reach is made up of values that each platform counts only for itself, so a person who saw the campaign in several places is counted several times. That is why the number has a ~ sign and why there is a note under the card saying that the number of people reached was probably lower. Treat reach as an upper estimate and use the values of the individual breakdown rows for comparisons, not the overall total.
The engagement rate comes out low
It is the average of the engagement rates of the individual sources, not a ratio calculated from the campaign totals. Custom measurement also enters the average, even if you have none for the campaign; its zero value then lowers the result. Use the number mainly to compare campaigns with each other, not as a figure for one specific network.
A network tab is empty even though there are numbers in the breakdown above
The tables only show items that have some data within the campaign period. In Google Ads, rows without a single impression, click or spend are left out completely. When a whole tab is empty, check that you have the relevant profile or ad account connected to this customer account.
Tables are missing from the printout
Print using the button with the printer icon or with Ctrl+P (Cmd+P) and wait until the Preparing data for printing window disappears. If you start printing some other way or cancel the preparation, the browser prints only what is currently loaded. Printing is described in more detail in the article Printing a page and saving to PDF.
The detail closed by itself and took me back to the campaign list
A campaign belongs to one customer account. As soon as you switch to a different customer account in the top bar, the detail closes and gas takes you back to the campaign list of the account you have just chosen. The same happens if you do not have access to that campaign.
I still do not understand the numbers or I think they are wrong
Write to us through the contact form. It helps if you include the name of the customer account, the name and hashtag of the campaign, the network in question, the period and a screenshot of the number that does not add up for you.