How to build a dashboard of Facebook ads in Google Data Studio

Facebook ads are an important part of many companies’ digital marketing strategies.

Whether the goal is to raise awareness or generate sales and revenue, measuring and reporting on campaign performance can be a challenge.

You may be wondering if my Facebook ads work? Or should I invest my marketing budget elsewhere?

The Facebook Ads platform allows you to create reports with data that is cut and sliced ​​in a variety of ways, providing a great insight into ad performance.

However, reporting on Facebook ads can be overpowering and confusing.

Even a simple dashboard can help you raise the bar and take reporting to the next level.

In this column, you’ll learn how to do this by using the Google Data Studio control panel to report on your Facebook ad performance.

Why you need a dashboard for Facebook ads

There is no shortage of reporting solutions, but in our opinion it is at the top of the Google Data Studio list.

It’s easy to use, fast and most importantly, free.

There are also several additional benefits, starting with the ability to import native data from Google Analytics.

This means you can measure the effectiveness of your Facebook campaigns and compare their performance with the performance of other channels.

In addition, the control panel allows you to easily manipulate data and present it in multiple reports or charts.

But that’s not all. From the user’s point of view, dashboards it is much easier to manage than reports when analyzing and comparing data sets and / or time periods.

How to get started with Google Data Studio and Facebook ads

While Google Data Studio is an amazing tool in the arsenal of digital marketing, the integration of Facebook Ads data requires a few extra steps compared to Google’s home platforms like Google Ads, Google Analytics, and more.

Don’t be afraid. Countless manual and automated solutions allow you to import data from Facebook Ads into Data Studio.

No matter what you choose, you should still be able to create a beautiful and valuable dashboard for you and your business.

Manual data import

Let’s start with manual data import.

1. Export data

The easiest way to do this is to create a report that can be downloaded to Facebook Ads.

Be aware that if you want to measure the performance of your ads by platform (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, etc.) and / or placement (Instagram stories, feed, right-hand column, etc.), you won’t be able to see metrics such as purchases, value purchase conversions or purchase price.

This level of data is not available on the platform (Facebook Ads), so it is also not accessible via data, no matter how you pull it, whether via API, connector or manually downloaded, as in our case.

Conversion data is only available at the highest level.

To see how successful your ads are and measure their ROI (ROI) or ROAS (ROI), you’ll need to download data broken down by campaign, ad set, and / or time only.

You can still create and download an additional report that breaks down data by delivery and thus platform and placement.

However, this will only show you performance metrics such as impressions, reach, clicks, CPC (cost-per-click), CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions), and so on.

There’s still a great example of using this data to evaluate and understand the performance of our ads on each platform and placement, and to use these lessons to optimize your campaign delivery.

Step 1: Intended Ad reporting and create a new report.

Step 2: Choose metrics and dimensions for your report.

Here it is important to keep in mind the end result and what information you will need for the control panel.

Step 3: Plan a report.

This is optional, but sending reports to your inbox instead of downloading them every time will make your life a lot easier!

Step 4: You may need to manipulate the data.

Alignment of data transferred from Facebook Ads may require some minor changes.

In the example above, we changed the date column to ensure that Google Data Studio recognizes it.

2. Data import

Once you’ve downloaded your CSV or Excel data, you can import it into Google Spreadsheets.

Step 5: From Excel to Google Spreadsheets.

If you plan to have your report emailed regularly, either daily, weekly, or monthly, you can automate some of the above steps.

Solutions like Zapier allow you to set up automatic import of data from an email attachment directly into Google Spreadsheets.

As this may vary from installation to installation, this procedure will not be covered in this manual. However, a quick Google search should help.

When you import data, link the worksheet to Data Studio as the data source.

Step 6: Add data.

You only need to connect Google Sheet to the Data Studio control panel once.

When you connect, any changes to the data in the worksheet are reflected in the control panel.

There are some really important things to keep in mind when adding data from a CSV or Google Spreadsheet file to Data Studio.

When aggregating and aggregating data, be careful with metrics such as range and frequency, and calculated metrics such as CPC, CPM, and so on.

Learn more in a few minutes. In the meantime, we can start planning and building our control panel.

Design and manufacture of control panel

Step 7: Start adding some design and functional elements.

In our case, we added a logo and time period control and made them at the “report level”.

This means that these elements will be copied to all sides of our control panel, which can be very convenient!

From here, the possibilities are endless.

Step 8: Change the theme, add data with indicators and tables, visualize them with charts and more.

We started with a few indicators to show top performance and KPI in our case.

You can also add free text that includes comments, insights, and recommendations.

Step 9: Add additional features to the control panel.

You can now customize your pages and how you access data with filters, segments, sliders, drop-down lists, and more.

Returning to our example, the screenshot above shows how using drop-down lists allows you to zoom in on subsets of data.

Here we can opt for platform segmentation (i.e. Instagram, Facebook, etc.).

Rinse and repeat

And here you have – the basic steps to creating a Data Studio dashboard for your Facebook ads.

It’s that simple.

You can add new data sources, add additional datasets to your report, and create even more accurate and advanced reports on your dashboards.

Measurements such as range and frequency

As mentioned above, some measurements need to be carefully managed.

For example, if we have a report that includes ad frequency broken down by week, neither the sum nor the average of these values ​​will give you the exact number you would report on the platform or Facebook Ads reports.

I suggest downloading and adding data for the period you want to report and adding it as a separate sheet (or tab if included in an existing report).

Calculated metrics

For values ​​such as average clickthrough rate, CPC, CPM, or even ROI (ROI) and ROAS, I suggest adding them as metrics calculated in Data Studio.

It’s simple.

In the metrics, select Add metrics, Create a fieldand there you can build your values.

Note that this is not limited to these simple measurements, but you can create and add your own measurements.

For example, you can add value such as gross profit margin or other financial metrics that give you a better understanding of your business’s performance in terms of Facebook advertising, and do so directly on the dashboard!

Connectors and automation

It is easy and fast to create an integrated solution that relies on manual data transfer or workflow setup using tools like Zapier.

However, there are also more advanced options.

These are particularly useful for agencies and large companies, which need to reduce manual tasks and give priority to full automation for reliability (ie reduction of error rate) and speed, especially when working with large data sets.

For this purpose, our company uses Dataslayer (although there are others), a reporting tool that provides a powerful and easy-to-use Google Spreadsheet linker.

The advantage is that you can use the connector to create and save queries on your worksheet, and once set, you can automatically drag and refresh data.

For example, you could set up a data transfer query every Monday for the past seven days and therefore automatically update and update the Data Studio control panel every week – without raising a finger.

Final considerations

As we have seen, creating a useful control panel requires some planning and setup work.

But the beauty of this is that dashboards (like a collection of reports and charts) are extremely powerful and flexible by nature.

Don’t be afraid to start with a simple version and keep creating multiple iterations with different views, tables, charts and more.

The time and effort invested will be more than worth it!

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