Connecting a page is the second step of linking. The Meta account only gives gas access to the list of pages you manage. Only when you pick a specific page and assign it to a customer account do you decide whose data will actually show up in gas and for whom it will be downloaded.
Before you start
- A linked Meta account. Signing in to Meta is described in the article Linking a Meta account. Without it, gas has no list of pages for you to choose from.
- Access to the page statistics. For pages, Meta does not work with a single role but with tasks, that is partial permissions granted one by one. It releases page statistics only to someone who has the Insights task on the page, or Full control outright. Tasks for content, messages, community activity or ads are not enough for statistics. They are granted by the page administrator on Facebook, it cannot be set up from gas.
- A published page. For a page that is not published yet, Facebook keeps statistics for only five days, whereas for a published page it keeps them for two years. An unpublished page can be connected too, but there is practically no history for it.
- A role in the customer account. A page can be assigned to a customer account by a user account with the Administrator or User role. Only an Administrator can remove the assignment.
- Free capacity in your plan. The number of connected profiles per network is limited by the plan of each customer account.
How to do it
- In Settings, open Connected services and on the Dashboard click the Meta accounts tile.
- In the list, click the name of the linked Meta account. Its detail opens with the Meta Ads, Facebook and Instagram tabs.
- Switch to the Facebook tab. It contains a table of pages that are already connected.
- Click the Connect Facebook button. The Connect Facebook page window opens.
- In the Page field, select a page from the list. gas offers the pages that your linked Meta account manages. Pages already connected under this account are unavailable in the list.
- Optionally fill in Page name. This is the name under which you will see the page in gas. An empty field means the name from Facebook will be used.
- Leave the Filtering by destination option unchecked unless you work with the tourism module.
- Select the customer accounts the page will be made available to. If you have a single customer account, gas fills it in itself and the selection is not shown.
- Confirm with the Connect page button.
The page and customer accounts
One page can be connected to several customer accounts at the same time. Data is downloaded once and every assigned customer account sees it in its own environment.
You change the assignment on the Facebook tab in the Customers column, or with the Change customer action on the relevant row. The column and the action are shown only if you belong to more than one customer account.
The selection always replaces the previous assignment. A customer account that you leave unchecked in the window loses the page and its users stop seeing its data.
A customer account may be unavailable in the list. The reason is always stated right next to it: Limit reached, No permission, Feature not in plan or Invalid license.
What happens next
The page is added to the table on the Facebook tab. If the customer account has regular reports, gas asks right away whether to add the page to them (the Add profile to report? window). You can postpone the offer with Not now.
For a connected page, gas starts downloading daily page metrics (for example Followers, Fans, Reach, Visits, Engagements, Video views or Ratings), plus Posts and their performance, Stories and Events. You will find everything in the Facebook section in the left menu. The page header lets you switch between the individual connected pages.
The first numbers usually appear within hours. Page overviews refresh roughly once an hour, posts several times a day. More frequent downloading will not speed anything up, though: Facebook itself recalculates most daily page figures only once every 24 hours and refreshes only a smaller part of them several times a day. A complete picture of yesterday is therefore available only one to two days later.
gas fetches history in the background and not all at once. Its extent is decided by Facebook: it keeps statistics of a published page for two years back and no longer gives access to older periods. On top of that, it is only willing to release a slice about three months long at a time, so gas downloads the history in parts and the full two-year overview builds up gradually, not within the first hour. Cumulative figures such as the number of fans are provided only for the current day and are not backfilled at all, so their series starts on the day of connection.
Unlinking a page
A page can be unlinked in two places and each has a different effect.
- Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts, the Unlink account action. The page disappears from this customer account and stays with the other assigned ones. If it is used by a regular report, gas lists the affected reports and offers the Remove the profile from these reports as well checkbox. Without it, the report stays configured but the page stops loading into it.
- Meta account detail → Facebook tab, the Delete profile action. This removes the page completely, including the data downloaded in gas. Data on Meta servers stays untouched. Deletion is scheduled with a 30-day delay, so if you change your mind and connect the page again within that time, the history comes back.
Common problems
The page did not appear in the list
The most common cause is an item unchecked in Meta's dialog during sign-in, the second one is insufficient access to the page statistics. A new consent overwrites the original one and does not create a second account.
- Check whether you have the Insights task or Full control on the page on Facebook.
- In Meta accounts, click Connect Meta account.
- In Meta's dialog, leave all pages switched on.
All pages in the list are unavailable
The message "All pages are already linked. Select another account." means that all available pages under this Meta account are connected. The remaining pages are most likely managed under a different Facebook account, so link that one too.
The page is connected but no data arrives
The Missing permission label appears next to its name. Access to Meta as a whole works, but you have lost the permission for that particular page. Click the label and then Reconnect, and allow the page again in Meta's dialog. After the first successful download the label disappears on its own and the missing days are filled in.
The series of a metric suddenly ends and does not continue
Meta gradually renews its page statistics and discontinues some of them. Some are replaced with new ones, others end without a replacement. That is exactly what happened to the figure for page post impressions: Meta stopped releasing it, states no replacement for it, and its series therefore ends on the day it was discontinued and does not continue. This is not a connection outage, reconnecting will do nothing about it. If the report period reaches beyond that day, gas prints a note that the network discontinued the metric instead of a chart with zeros.
The page reach changed abruptly from a certain day
Meta replaced the original reach figure with a new one that counts differently: it counts only content that was actually rendered on a person's screen, whereas the original one counted content delivered. Values after the switch tend to be lower and the old and new part of the series cannot be joined continuously. gas uses the new figure, so data keeps arriving, just take comparisons with the period before the change with a grain of salt.
The numbers in gas do not match what Facebook shows
Some Facebook overviews count people, not impressions, and Facebook itself labels them as approximate, not accurate to the unit. Add to that a different definition of the tracked period and the filling in of the most recent days. So compare closed days and the same period, small deviations are expected.
The page history is almost empty
Check whether the page is published on Facebook. For an unpublished page, Facebook keeps statistics for only five days, so gas has nothing to download and older periods will not be filled in even after publishing.
Another page cannot be added
Limit reached is shown for the customer account. Unlink a page you no longer track, or ask for a plan upgrade in Settings → Customer account → Subscription.