I know how to make the accounts visible in the connector, however...

[GabrielBurgos]

Hi, first of all, I apretiate the work Mito is putting on this useful connector, and that is open to useful community feedback so they can improve it.

Recently I have tried the connector but couldn't get to the accounts I wanted to report on, so I noticed many people had the same issue: only a few accounts showed up with the connector in Data Studio. So I decided to see what was different between the accounts that the connector had access to, and the ones it didn't, and I found out what it was:

In the Business Manager, go to Settings, and choose the Ad Account you want to report on, and give it a "Business name" and save the changes. - Keep in mind that you must also fill in the Business address fields and Business country in order to be able to save the changes.

This will make the account visible in the Data Studio Connector by Mito, under the name you just gave it, allowing you to retrieve the data from that account.

And there you have it, aparently the connector is requesting the "business name" from every account you manage, but doesn't request the actual name of the account, so it just doesn't retrieve any information from accounts without this field.

Here comes the "However" part:

The connector has other issues, data issues.
It turns out I was able to make a table with the data the connector gets from the Ads manager, and most of it is actually quite precise, except the total values.
As it is right now, the connector allows you to use a "Results Row" in the Data Studio Report. This field however, is calculated by Data Studio itself with the raw data of the Ads that is getting from Facebook thanks to the connector, and this can result in some mistaken values:

To the left: A table I made in Data Studio with data fetched by the connector.
To the right: a table straight from my Ads Manager in Business Facebook.

As you can see, there is discrepancies between two of the results values in each table, these being: "Reach" and "Cost per Result". This is due to "Reach" being a value that is never really the sum of the individual reach of every ad, wich is how Data Studio is adding them, and can only really be calculated by Facebook itself. With "Cost per Result" what happens is that Data studio calculates an Average from every "Cost per Result" row, when the right formula goes something like this: "Total spend/Total results".

And that's it, I hope this is useful to both the users trying to report their Facebook Ads on Data Studio, and to the developer team so in the future they can improve the features of the connector.
Once again thank you for this tool, that despite it's flaws, can be very useful at the end of the day.

[Sinrpion]

Thank you very much for this, it worked very well

[djozsef]

Hello @GabrielBurgos,

Thank you very much for your comment, you are a real hero to figure it out!
Regarding the Business Name you are right: Facebook API returns empty names if the business name is not filled in Ad Account. We filter these business and do not show them because it caused problems during testing. But I see an option to generate a name for those loosely configured businesses like "Unnamed business [1234567891234567]". What do you think, would it be useful? Of course we will update documentation to warn users about this.

Regarding the data discrepancy issue we do not make calculations on data, the connector just passes data untouched to Data Studio. But I see your point and we will check options how to make it better.

Thank you for your input, very much appreciated.

[GabrielBurgos]

I'm glad that you find this useful and again thanks for your work. I think your proposal is a good workaround that would help a lot.

Regarding the second point of the post (results data discrepancy), I was thinking that maybe if you could add a dimension field that works as a "results dimension", if you will, so that we could have the data calculated direct from Facebook. This dimension in my head would be "Account", meaning the field would simply just take the data from the account without differentiating between Campaigns, ad sets and ads if one wouldn't want it to. That way if I want a table with a results row, I just create a minitable with the "Account" dimension field and the metrics I'm measuring at the end.

Anyway, is just a thought, but let me know what you think :)