Meta ads in gas

The Meta ads section in the left menu shows the performance of the paid advertising you run on Facebook and Instagram. Meta calls this area Meta Ads. gas measures your advertising and puts its numbers together with the rest of your data, but it does not manage it: you cannot create a campaign in it, pause one or change its budget. That is done in Meta's own tools.

Before you start

Two things have to be true for the section to appear in the menu and have something to show.

• A Meta ad account is connected to your customer account. Check this in Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts, where everything connected is listed by network. If there is no Meta ad account there, you have to connect one first.
• Your plan includes ad networks. On the lowest plan the Meta ads item does not appear in the left menu at all. You can see what your plan includes in Settings → Customer account → Subscription. To upgrade, write through the contact form.

How advertising in Meta is organised

Without this hierarchy the numbers are hard to read, because each page of the section works with a different level.

1. The ad account is where advertising is paid for and billed. It has its own name, its own currency and is managed under a business account in Meta. You can connect several of them to gas.
2. The campaign is the top level inside an ad account. It defines what the advertising is supposed to achieve, which is called the campaign goal (for example Traffic, Awareness or Conversions).
3. The ad set defines the audience, the budget and the placements in Meta. gas does not show this level.
4. The ad is the specific advert, that is the image or video with text that people see.

In gas you therefore work with two levels: the campaign and the ad. From the campaign list you go straight to the list of ads in that campaign, the ad set level in between is skipped.

Impressions and reach: the pair that confuses people most

Two columns that you will meet all over the section mean different things:

• Impressions is the number of times the ad appeared on a screen, even if the same person saw it ten times.
• Reach is the number of different people who saw the ad at least once.

What you will find in the section

The section has several items in the left menu. At the top of every page there is a header with the ad account selector, the period selector and the refresh button.

Overview

A dashboard made up of widgets. By default it shows a graph of Impressions, a graph of Spend and the values of Clicks, Video views (25%) and Reach for the selected period.

You can change the layout. The three-dot button on the right of the header offers Add widget, Edit layout (you can then move and remove widgets) and Reset to default layout. A new widget is created by choosing a metric and a display type (Value or Graph).

Overview always works with a single ad account. If you have several connected, switch between them with the selector on the left of the page header.

Campaigns

A table of the campaigns that actually delivered in the selected period, that is those that had some spend or impressions. A campaign that did not run in the period will not appear in the table, even though it exists in Meta.

The default view shows the columns Name, Campaigns (your own campaigns in gas, see below), Impressions, Reach, Spend and Start time. In the column selector you can also switch on Ad account, Campaign goal, CTR, CPC, CPP, CPM, End time and Creation time. Customer accounts with the tourism module get an extra Destination column.

The values in the columns are always for the selected period, not for the whole life of the campaign. At the bottom there is a pinned Summary row with totals for all rows matching the filter, not just for the page of the table you are currently looking at.

A campaign does not have its own detail page. Clicking its name opens the list of ads limited to that campaign.

Ads

A list of individual ads, again only those that delivered in the selected period. The default view shows the columns Name, Campaign in Meta, Campaigns, Impressions, Reach, Spend, CTR and Creation time. The column selector adds Ad account, Status and Effective status; the values in the last two come straight from Meta in English (for example ACTIVE or PAUSED).

Clicking the name of an ad opens its detail page. When you hover over a row, an Open in network icon appears next to the name, which leads to the Facebook post the ad is built on.

If you reached the page by clicking through from a campaign, there is a bar at the top saying Showing only ads from campaign … with a Show all ads button.

Below the table there is a note that Meta provides data at the level of individual ads for at most 37 months back.

Ad detail

The page of one specific ad. On it you will find:

• The Preview of the post loaded directly from Facebook. It only loads once you allow embedded content from social networks in your privacy settings, otherwise there is a Show preview button instead.
• The information panel: Profile (the name of the ad account), Published, the name of the campaign in Meta, links to your campaigns and a View in social network button.
• Cards with numbers: Spend, Impressions, Reach, CTR, CPC and, for video ads, Video views as well.
• The Metric timeline graph. Spend and Impressions are switched on in it, the other series (Reach, CTR, CPC, Video views) can be added by clicking in the legend below the graph.
• The Daily metric development table with values for individual days.
• The print button in the header, which saves the page as a PDF.

On a phone neither the graph nor the daily table are shown, and the page tells you to open them in a browser on a computer instead.

Individual metric pages

The remaining menu items (Spend, Impressions, Reach, Interactions, Clicks, Video views) open a page with a graph of one metric over the selected period. In their header you can also switch the graph step (Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year) and the graph type.

These pages and Overview work with numbers at campaign level, not at the level of individual ads.

The Campaigns column

Both the campaign table and the ad table have a Campaigns column. It does not show campaigns from Meta, but your own campaigns created in gas in the Campaigns section, that is the layer that joins the performance of one activity across networks.

The matching works through a hash that a campaign in gas is given and that you then write into the name of the campaign in Meta yourself. When gas finds such a hash in the name, it adds a link to your campaign into the column. For an ad that sits outside a matched campaign, the hash is also looked for in the name of the ad itself.

So that the columns do not get mixed up, the column with the name of the campaign from Meta is called Campaign in Meta, whereas Campaigns always means your campaigns in gas.

The currency of the ad account and the conversion of spend

Every ad account in Meta has its own currency. It is set when the account is created and cannot be changed in gas.

gas converts spend into Czech crowns so that several ad accounts can be added up and compared with other networks. In the Spend column, on the cards of the detail page and in the Overview widgets you therefore always see the value in CZK, even if the account is kept in euros or dollars.

It is the spend itself that gets converted. The cost-per-result indicators (CPC, CPM, CPP) are taken by gas from Meta exactly as Meta reports them, that is in the currency of the ad account.

Which exchange rate is used to convert spend, which day the rate is taken from and why small differences against Meta's interface can appear is described in a separate article about currency and the conversion of spend in this category.

How fresh the numbers are and how far back the history goes

Meta recalculates numbers retroactively. Its documentation states that ad statistics are refreshed roughly every fifteen minutes and that the values stop changing only 28 days after Meta first reported them. Until then a day can be recalculated retroactively, typically because of conversions that are attributed with a delay. Treat the numbers for today and yesterday as provisional.

gas downloads data from Meta several times a day, campaigns separately and individual ads separately. It also keeps recalculating the spend for the last 28 days during the day, so that it catches later corrections made by Meta.

Some values are marked by Meta as estimated. They are not calculated as an exact sum but by sampling or with a model, and they are meant as a directional guide. This includes reach and frequency, that is the figures about the number of different people.

The history at the level of individual ads goes back at most 37 months, because Meta does not provide data in that detail any further back. Campaign numbers are stored by gas in its own archive, so for an account that has been connected for a long time you will see older periods too. For a freshly connected account the history is filled in only as far back as Meta releases it.

The refresh button in the page header reloads what gas already has stored. It does not trigger a new download from Meta, so you will not get numbers that Meta has not yet calculated.

Common problems

The Meta ads section is not in the left menu

The section is part of the paid plans. Look in Settings → Customer account → Subscription to see what your plan includes. To upgrade, write through the contact form.

The section is in the menu but reports No account

No Meta ad account is connected to the customer account. Open Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts and see whether there is a row with a Meta ad account. If not, it needs to be connected; connecting may be done by the Administrator or User role, not by a Viewer.

A campaign is missing from the list even though it exists in Meta

The campaign table only lists campaigns that actually delivered in the selected period, that is those that had spend or impressions. A campaign that is only prepared, is paused, or finished earlier will not appear in the list. Move the period to the time when the campaign was running.

There are no ads older than three years in the ad list

Meta provides data at the level of individual ads for at most 37 months back, that is a little over three years. For older periods switch to the Campaigns page, where the numbers reach further back.

The numbers do not match Meta's Ads Manager

There are three most common causes, and they often act at the same time:

Impressions in gas are much higher than reach in Meta

This is not an error, they are two different concepts. Impressions in gas is the number of times the ad was shown, whereas reach is the number of different people. Compare Impressions in gas with Meta's impressions, and Reach in gas with what Meta reports as reach.

The reach of a campaign and the reach of its ads cannot be compared or added up

Reach counts different people, and such a number cannot be added up: the same person would be counted again on every day and for every ad.

• In the Campaigns table, Reach is the sum of the daily values for the selected period, so it is overstated compared with the real number of people.
• In the Ads table and on the ad detail page, Reach is the genuine unique figure that Meta reports for the ad as a whole. It therefore does not follow the selected period but the whole time for which gas has the ad downloaded.
• The Summary row in the ad list adds these values up, so a person who saw two of your ads is counted twice in the total.

Meta does not report a genuine unique reach for a set of campaigns or for an account, so gas has nowhere to take it from.

The spend matches but the cost per click does not

For an ad account kept in a foreign currency it is the spend that is converted into crowns. gas takes the CPC, CPM and CPP indicators from Meta unchanged, that is in the currency of the ad account. For an account in crowns this difference does not occur.

There is nothing in the Campaigns column

The column shows your campaigns created in gas, and they are matched by the hash in the name of the campaign in Meta. An empty column means the hash is missing from the name or is written differently. The hash is case sensitive. Add it to the name of the campaign in Meta and the link will appear the next time data is downloaded.

An ad has no preview

The preview is an embedded post from Facebook, so it only loads once you allow embedded content in the privacy settings of your profile. If it is allowed and the preview is still missing, the post has probably been deleted from Facebook, or the ad was created without a public post (for example as an ad that exists only in the ad account).

The ad is in the list but the detail page is empty

The daily values of an ad go back 37 months. If the ad ran earlier, it stays in the list but the graph and the daily table are empty. gas also writes a note about this limitation below the ad detail.

Clicking a campaign does not open its detail page

That is by design, a campaign has no detail page of its own. Clicking the campaign name opens the list of its ads, where the numbers are broken down by individual ad. You get back to the full list with the Show all ads button.

I cannot see in the table which ad account a row belongs to

The Ad account column is hidden in the default view. Switch it on in the column selector above the table. It is useful when you have several ad accounts connected at once.

Data stopped on a certain day

Most often the access to Meta expired or was revoked. Look in Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts to see whether there is a warning about a paused connection on the account, and reconnect it. After reconnecting, gas fills in the missing days, but only as far back as Meta releases the history.

I do not know who connected the account and I cannot see it in Connected services

In Settings → Connected services you only see your own connections. The ad account may have been connected by a colleague. The full list, including the Who links the account column, is in Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts; the email address in the column is a link you can write to straight away.