A few months ago, I wrote about discontinued Facebook reporting metrics. Since then, Facebook updated their Ads Reporting section to make it much easier to create, save and share reports. Here’s an overview so you can start creating some new reports to meet your and/or your clients’ needs.

Two Ways to Navigate to Custom Reports

From Ads Manager: Select “Create Custom Report” from the Export drop-down.

From the Main Menu: Select “Ads Reporting” under the Measure & Report Column.

Five Categories for Sorting Your Data

The following are listed as “breakdowns” in the left tab of the reporting interface. You can navigate to each one by clicking the drop-down triangle:

Level: Campaign, Ad Set and Ad – Great to see high level or more granular data

Time: Day, Week, 2 Weeks, Month

Delivery: Age, Gender, Geographic Locations (various options), Device, Platform and a few others. The one I use the most is by platform so my clients can see how their ads are doing from one channel vs another for the ads that overlap both:

Action: Canvas Component, Conversion Device, Carousel Card, Video View Type, Video Sound and others

Dynamic Creative Asset: Description, headline, image, text, URL and more

Note that not all of these are available for every report breakdown. For example, using the screenshot above with platform selected, I can’t also select fields such as age, gender, region, or any of the dynamic creative assets. This holds true even when you add a filter (more on that below). These would be amazing and very helpful layers, so I hope they roll out in time.

Available Metrics

Right next to the breakdown tab, you’ll see the metrics tab, which works in a similar way as the options available in the breakdown tab. These are basically the columns you’ll see for your report. They include everything from the basics like actions, impressions and spend to page likes, post engagement, store visits, budget, and schedule. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, just use the handy search feature at the top – it’s such a time and frustration saver!

Filtering

Once you have the breakdowns and metrics you need, you can use filters to narrow down even further. There are countless possibilities here, so you just have to play around with them to find what you are looking for. Side note: I love the “had delivery” default so that I’m not seeing items with zero data returned

Viewing Options

Grouping and Ungrouping

You can group or ungroup the data when you click on the drop-down arrow for certain columns. When the data is grouped, it reminds me of what a pivot table looks like.

Here is what it looks like when it is ungrouped, with single line items for each line item:

Sorting

Click on one of the column headers (not the arrrow) to sort by increasing or decreasing values.

Views

You can change your data field by rearranging the columns or the attribution windows. The default attribution window is 28-day click and 1-day view.

Save

When your report is just the way you’d like it, you can save it by clicking on the Save icon on the right so you don’t have to recreate it the next time you need it. The first time you save it, you should click “Save As” to name your report and select if you’d like the report to be emailed to you:

All Reports

Saved Reports

You can access all of your saved reports by clicking on the All Reports link:

Duplicate

If you want to create a report similar to an existing saved report, you can do so by clicking on the drop-down arrow next to your saved report and selecting “Duplicate”:

Templates

If all that seems too overwhelming, you can look through the template reports. To get there, click on the All Reports link (seen in the above screenshot). On the right, you’ll see the “Create from Template” button, which lets you see a variety of set reports in which the metrics on the right will vary. Once you pick a template, you can still adjust the breakdowns and metrics to meet your needs and save the report:

Conclusion

The new custom reporting feature is a helpful way to see your Facebook data in ways that are most helpful to your needs. The best way to find the reports you need are simply to get into the interface and play around with the breakdowns and metrics.

Have you created custom reports in Facebook yet? Have any other tips to share? Comment below to let us know.