Facebook Ads Reporting
We have a business account that shares custom audiences with other accounts. For our billing purposes, we need the Impressions data for all ad sets that used our custom audiences. We have a large number of custom audiences and an equally exhaustive number of client accounts.
Is there any way to set up a report(in facebook, use an integration or a third-party application or via API) to get this data?
We currently do it manually, and it is painfully time-consuming!
The short answer is:
Yes, you can absolutely automate this.
The most direct way is to use the Facebook Marketing API to pull impression data for ad sets that are specifically targeting your shared custom audience IDs.
You can then pipe this data into a reporting tool like Looker Studio for a fully automated dashboard, completely removing the manual work.
The long answer is:
What you’re trying to do is a classic cross-account reporting problem that Facebook’s own Ads Manager interface isn’t built to handle easily.
The solution lies in bypassing the standard interface and pulling the data directly via the API.
A fantastic, scalable, and surprisingly cheap way to set this up involves a few connected components: the Facebook Conversions API, Google Tag Manager with a server-side container, and Looker Studio.
First, let’s talk about the data going into your audiences.
By implementing the Facebook Conversions API (CAPI) using a server-side Google Tag Manager container – hosted on a service like Stape or Google Cloud Platform – you create a more reliable data stream.
This setup sends Standard Events and custom events directly from your server to Facebook’s server.
This means your data collection isn’t affected by browser-based tracking blockers or iOS updates.
The result is higher-quality, more accurate custom audiences to share with your clients, which is a huge value-add in itself.
Now for the reporting part, which is your main issue.
Once you have API access, you can programmatically ask Facebook for the specific data you need.
You would query the API across all the client ad accounts you have access to.
In your query, you’d specify that you only want performance data – like impressions – for ad sets where the targeting includes one of your specific custom audience IDs.
This is the filtering step you are currently doing by hand.
This is where Looker Studio comes in.
Looker Studio is a free and powerful data visualization tool.
You can use a pre-built connector or create a simple script to connect Looker Studio directly to the Facebook Marketing API.
This connection can be set to refresh automatically – daily, or even hourly.
The script pulls the filtered data for impressions on ad sets using your audiences and displays it in a clean dashboard.
You get your billing data in near real-time without ever having to log in and manually pull reports from dozens of accounts again.
This entire stack is extremely cost-effective – GTM and Looker Studio are free, and services like Stape have very low-cost plans, making it an excellent solution that not only solves your reporting headache but also improves the quality of the core asset you’re providing to clients.
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