Pivot tables

You may want to see or export crosstabs of one outcome, user feature, or design feature, by another. Sometimes you just want to see these quickly, but this might also be a way to extract the 'raw data' you wish to analyze elsewhere.

1. Start new pivot table

From within Ads Manager From 'ads reporting' (3 Aug 2022 updated interface)

Click "Create Report" --> Pivot table

2. As before, make sure you've selected the right date range, and (redo) any relevant filters

Here I add a filter for 'campaign name ' contains 'general'. Because I'm specifically trying to pull down some information on 'which video people saw' in this group (which needs a special setting to access... as noted below)

3. "Customize pivot table" – "Breakdowns" ... the things you want this to disaggregate across (sums and averages within groups)

• the 'campaigns', the 'ad names'

• timing, demographics

• Drill down to "Custom breakdowns", "Dynamic Creative Asset", to get it broken down by the text linked to the ads:

4. "Customize pivot table" – "Metrics"

Select the things you want reported, and deselect things that are not interesting or irrelevant to this case (like 'website purchases') or numbers that can be easily computed on your own

Normally, I'd suggest leaving out the redundant 'Cost per Result' but it's probably good to have as at least one sanity and data check.

Other stuff like 'video play time' could sometimes be very relevant, but I'll leave it out for now

I added a few features I thought might be interesting or useful. Was anyone drawn in to pledge? When did each campaign start/end (doublecheck)? How many unique link clicks?

5. (Optional) Conditional formatting

This could also be helpful if you are using the Ads Manager tools in situ, but obviously this has no value for downloading.

6. Save report for later use, share

If you think the report is useful in-situ, you can also share a link

7. Export the data

As in ...

(or consider direct import into R using tools like the rfacebookstat package)

Using Meta ads manager reporting suite

Extracting simple results

1. Go to "the reporting suite in Meta ads manager"

2. Specify some filters:

This gets us the screen below

3. Specify the date range.

Here “Effective Giving Guide Lead Generation campaign … ran late November 2021 - January 2022" (Careful in specifying the dates; the interface is weird)

After specifying these dates, more information comes up in the basic columns:

5. Export simple results for Campaigns

Click 'Reports' ... upper right.

We can 'create a custom report', which saves this for later tweaking, or merely 'export table data'. I will do the latter for now:

Note: I chose CSV and do not include summary rows, to avoid confusion later.

Now I import this data into R (I usually use code but let's do it the interactive way for illustration)...

It seems that the option 'include summary row' was probably not wanted here, and that row with blank 'campaign name' could cause confusion.

It seems to have removed the "bid strategy" column, and added 'reporting starts' and ...'ends' from the filter. Otherwise, everything else seems the same as in the ad manager view, although some labels have changed.

Campaigns, ad sets, ads

We see three tabs

1. Campaigns

2. Ad sets for 1 campaign

3. Ads for 1 campaign

Campaigns

Here we have 7 campaigns, each with separate budgets, and start and end dates (although these mainly overlap).

It looks like some campaigns were set up for direct comparison or "A/B" perhaps, with the exact same budgets and end dates, and similar names:\

Ad sets

Here, there are 52 total 'ad sets' across all campaigns.

I'm going to export this as a csv too, in case it's useful.

Ads

There are also 52 "ads"; it seems in this case, one per ad set:

The information in the 'ads' table seems the same as in the 'ad sets table' ... other than a link to preview the ad content itself (which I don't seem to have access to atm).