Facebook Ads

Prerequisites

• An active Facebook (FB) account from which data is to be ingested exists.

• You have access to the Facebook Ads console and related statistics.

  Note: Facebook’s authentication system uses pop-ups that may encounter issues if ad blockers are not disabled during the setup. Read Authorization.

• You are assigned the Team Administrator, Team Collaborator, or Pipeline Administrator role in Hevo to create the Pipeline.

Configuring Facebook Ads as a Source

Perform the following steps to configure Facebook Ads as the Source in your Pipeline:

1. Click PIPELINES in the Navigation Bar.

2. Click + CREATE PIPELINE in the Pipelines List View.

3. On the Select Source Type page, select Facebook Ads.

4. On the Configure your Facebook Ads account page, do one of the following:

   • Select a previously configured account and click CONTINUE.

   • Click Add Facebook Ads Account and perform the following steps to configure an account:

     

     1. Log in to your Facebook account, and click Continue as <Company Name> in the pop-up dialog.

        

     2. Click Save to authorize Hevo to access your Facebook Ads and related statistics.

        

     3. Click Got it in the confirmation dialog.

        

   Note: If you enable Advanced Protection, such as two-factor authentication or password changes, you will need to reauthorize Hevo; otherwise, the Pipeline will be marked as failed.

5. On the Configure your Facebook Ads Source page, specify the following:

   

   • Pipeline Name: A unique name for your Pipeline, not exceeding 255 characters.

   • Select Ad accounts: The Facebook Ads account(s) from where you want to replicate the data. One Facebook account can contain multiple Facebook Ads accounts.

   • Report Type: Select one of the following report types to ingest data from your Facebook Ads:

     • Predefined Reports: Hevo automatically selects all the reports and their respective fields and columns for ingestion.

     • Custom Reports: Hevo allows you to manually select the aggregation level, the aggregation time, and the fields for the Facebook Ads report that you want to replicate. Refer to the section, Custom Reports to know how to configure them.

   • Ad Action Report Time: The reported time of an action by a Facebook user. The available options are:

     • Impression: The time at which your ad was watched.

     • Conversion: The time when an action was taken after watching your ad.

     • Mixed (Default): The time when an impression or link click occurred on your ad and the time when a conversion action, such as a purchase on your website, occurred for it.

   • Historical Sync Duration: The duration for which you want to ingest the existing data from the Source. Default duration: 1 Year.

   • Attribution Setting

     • Custom Attribution Window Setting: You can specify either one or both of the following:

       • Click Attribution Window: The number of days between a person clicking your ad and taking an action such as install or subscribe. Default value: 7d_click (7 days).

       • View Attribution Window: The number of days between a person viewing your ad and taking an action such as install or subscribe. Default value: 1d_view (1 day).

     • Use Account Attribution Setting: The attribution setting that you have defined in your Facebook Ads account.

     • Use Unified Attribution Setting: The attribution settings that you have defined for the individual ad sets.

   • Advanced Settings

     • Thumbnail Height: The rendered height of the thumbnails provided in the thumbnail URL. Default value: 64.

     • Thumbnail Width: The rendered width of the thumbnails provided in the thumbnail URL: Default value: 64.

     Note: The specified height and width values must be within the range 1-65000.

6. Click TEST & CONTINUE.

7. Proceed to configuring the data ingestion and setting up the Destination.

Custom Reports

With custom reports, you can manually select the parameters such as the aggregation settings, breakdown settings, and fields for the Facebook Ads reports that you want to replicate.

Note: The data included in the custom report is based on the set of parameters you select.

To configure custom reports, specify the following Custom Report Settings:

• Select Fields: The fields that you want to include in the report such as Ad name or Campaign ID.

• Select Breakdowns: The filters to further narrow down the results of your retrieved reports. For example, you can break down the results by Date or Age Group.

• Aggregation Window: The time interval for which the report data is aggregated. This category shows you the trend and performance based on 1 Day, 1 Week, 1 Month, or 90 days period. Default value: 1 Day. For example, if the aggregation time is 1 Month, the report contains data for the past one month from the time the Pipeline runs.

• Aggregation Level: The primary filter on which the report data is aggregated, such as the Ad ID or the Account ID. Default value: Ad ID.

Data Replication

For predefined reports

• Historical Data: The first run of the Pipeline ingests historical data for the selected reports on the basis of the historical sync duration specified at the time of creating the Pipeline and loads it to the Destination. Default duration: 1 Year.

• Incremental Data: Once the historical data ingestion is complete, every subsequent run of the Pipeline fetches new and updated data for the reports as per the ingestion frequency.

• Data Refresh: Hevo creates a replication task for Facebook Ads reports. It also creates a data refresher task per report type to fetch the attributing results of an older date. By default, 30 days old data is fetched once per day.

For custom reports

• Historical Data: In the first run of the Pipeline, Hevo ingests historical data for the reports on the basis of the historical sync duration selected at the time of creating the Pipeline and loads it to the Destination. Default duration: 1 Year.

• Incremental Data: Once the historical data ingestion is complete, every subsequent run of the Pipeline fetches new and updated data for the reports as per the ingestion frequency.

• Data Refresh: Hevo resyncs the data of the past 30 days.

Schema and Primary Keys

Hevo uses the following schema to upload the predefined reports’ data in the Destination:

Note:

• The schema for custom reports is dynamically generated based on the settings you provide while configuring your Source. However, to maintain a consistent structure for loading data into Destination tables, Hevo adds additional tables to the schema. These tables do not store any data and do not impact data ingestion for custom reports.

• From Release 1.87 onwards, with JDBC-based Destinations, Hevo creates the Destination schema for predefined reports based on the data retrieved from Facebook Ads. This ensures that the limit on the number of Destination columns is not exceeded, and only fields that contain data are created in the Destination tables. However, this could lead to some Source fields being mapped to incompatible Destination columns. Read Resolving Incompatible Schema Mappings.

Data Model

The following is the list of tables (objects) that are created at the Destination when you run the Pipeline for predefined reports:

Note: For custom reports, the data model is derived dynamically based on the custom report settings you provide.