Accessing Reports

With the Facebook Ads Manager, you can access important reports to better understand how your campaigns are performing. Reports are essential. They'll provide the details you need to refine your advertisements and identify whether you're achieving your goals. To access your reports, you'll go the Manage Your Ads section from the drop-down in the upper right-hand corner, as we did before. Then chose Reports from the menu on the left.

You might notice there are a lot more campaigns here than the ones we've created in this course. That's because I've gone ahead and logged in under my account, so you can see what it looks like once you have a lot of data associated with your ads. Now, once you enter the Reports section, you'll be brought to a list of general metrics, listed by campaign and sorted by their start date. Let's look at how to navigate this section, starting at the top. Here we have the heading, General Metrics. But to the left of that, we have a drop-down menu which contains some other reports we can select. It's here that you can select some pre-defined reports, perhaps on website conversions, demographics, or Facebook page actions.

Selecting one of these reports will change the view of this page to reflect that category. As we move along the top, you'll have the option to schedule, save, share, and export a report. I'll be talking more about the scheduling feature in a later video, so let's instead focus on this Export button. If you work with your data in Excel, Numbers, or another desktop application, it can be helpful to get your reports off Facebook. You might want to do this, say, to create your own charts. When you click Export, you can choose to download an Excel-formatted file, or a CSV.

You can modify the dates on the right-hand side by using this drop-down. It's defaulted to the last seven days, but if I select that, Facebook will give us some different options. We can choose to review data from today, or all the way up to the last three months.
We can also choose Custom to enter some custom dates. You could look at a time period, say the first quarter, and then group it by seven days, or 30 days if that option is available to you.

Now let's take a look at the columns below. As you scroll to the right in this field, you'll notice that Facebook has several columns that they've selected for you. If you want to change the columns that are displaying data, you can do so by Customize Columns, in the upper left-hand corner.

I recommend getting in the habit of checking your advertisements daily. By being aware of how your ads are performing, you'll make informed decisions that will increase the longevity of your campaigns. This will only take a minute. Make it part of your morning routine. Check your messages, respond to some emails, and check your ads.