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I have found the FB pixel to be both awesome and not fully baked in terms of reporting. The general concept of allowing custom events is awesome. It means it p

I have found the FB pixel to be both awesome and not fully baked in terms of reporting. The general concept of allowing custom events is awesome. It means it plays really nicely with situations that don't fit nicely into their standard events. By the same token, custom events feel like second class citizens in FB ad reporting. Here is a scenario and I'd love any suggestions if people have them because there is no documentation on this and FB has basically done away with access to a live person for ads (while interestingly enough Google now goes out of its way to connect you with a live person, even if only via chat). I work on a product with a free trial with subscriptions of multiple plan levels and terms. I can track a custom event on subscription and pass plan and term params along with the revenue data, but there is no easy way to drill into those dimensions keyed off of custom params with their reporting. The only manual hack I've found is to create an aggregate custom event for all subscriptions for top level reporting, and then individual custom events for each plan/term permutation (plan1/annual, plan1/monthly, plan2/annual, plan2/monthly, etc.). This is manageable for now as there are only 8 events plus the aggregate one, but I then have to add each of those as custom columns to reports which gets super messy. The not fully baked part is that as an advertiser, my ideal reporting dashboard in FB would let me drill in at multiple levels and segment reporting by these custom dimensions just by using a single custom event's params. So I'd have a report segment option for plan and term that then broke those out in the table and then the chart (and their charting capabilities are also sorely lacking right now for serious advertisers). Instead, I need to dump this to a spreadsheet and pivot it if I want to do any serious analysis. Has the author or anyone else solved for this differently outside of using a PMD with better reporting? We'll end up switching to one soon enough, but I feel like FB has really failed to go the final steps with this. Adding custom parameters but then not allowing advertisers to report and segment by them is a huge opportunity for them. And they clearly have the data parsed already because offer it in the custom conversion and audience builder tools. Also, and this applies to most ad platforms...I wish there were better support for recurring up and LTV tracking and reporting. Helping me easily report on the full deferred value the ads are driving makes it easier for me to build the case for more spend. I can do that in other analytics tools, but I feel like this is data FB would want to have in a structured format. Maybe that's just me though.

jackgolding 10y ago
The problems you are experiencing should be what ta digital marketing consultant should be able to solve (i.e. naming conventions, automated reports) however anything above rudimentary analysis seems to be outside most analyst's skill sets form my experience - the tools don't help with this as you've discovered. You could even think that the platform providers (Google, Facebook) make it unnecessarily hard on purpose...
- shostack 10y ago
  So...I actually am a senior digital marketer who has been doing this stuff for over a decade. The naming conventions aren't an issue, and automating through another analytics platform has its own issues (GA for example won't track FB's view throughs unless you manage it all via an ad server that can get the post-impression performance from FB). My ask was around whether anyone had solved for this use case in FB since the documentation on Custom Events is limited in this regard. My broader point is that having seem MANY different ad platforms in my time, I'm disappointed that FB's is so limited compared to something like AdWords which, despite its issues, I still consider the gold standard in terms of UI/UX. Your last note about making it unnecessarily hard on purpose is an interesting one that I've heard floated on more than one occasion. I think there is probably some gain for them in not giving super granular data on this as it leads to inefficiency in ad spend which in turn means higher CPMs for them. The counter-argument I've always made is that if you provide an amazing ad platform with great tools to drive performance, advertisers will shift more budget to you away from competitors in such a manner that should offset losses from people cutting out more of the crap inventory. There's also the possibility they don't prioritize giving their ad platform love because it nudges people to PMDs and they have a lot to gain by growing that ecosystem. If your partners are doing all the development work for you to build their own interfaces AND they are driving more media sales, that might be enough to drive a strategic shift away from their own platform. I'd be very shocked if this were the case though.
blahi 10y ago
There's a package in R that connects to the API. Native dataframes, dplyr, the best visualizations out there and rmarkdown notebooks and flexdashboard make it great for things like that.

jackgolding 10y ago

The problems you are experiencing should be what ta digital marketing consultant should be able to solve (i.e. naming conventions, automated reports) however anything above rudimentary analysis seems to be outside most analyst's skill sets form my experience - the tools don't help with this as you've discovered. You could even think that the platform providers (Google, Facebook) make it unnecessarily hard on purpose...

shostack 10y ago
So...I actually am a senior digital marketer who has been doing this stuff for over a decade. The naming conventions aren't an issue, and automating through another analytics platform has its own issues (GA for example won't track FB's view throughs unless you manage it all via an ad server that can get the post-impression performance from FB). My ask was around whether anyone had solved for this use case in FB since the documentation on Custom Events is limited in this regard. My broader point is that having seem MANY different ad platforms in my time, I'm disappointed that FB's is so limited compared to something like AdWords which, despite its issues, I still consider the gold standard in terms of UI/UX. Your last note about making it unnecessarily hard on purpose is an interesting one that I've heard floated on more than one occasion. I think there is probably some gain for them in not giving super granular data on this as it leads to inefficiency in ad spend which in turn means higher CPMs for them. The counter-argument I've always made is that if you provide an amazing ad platform with great tools to drive performance, advertisers will shift more budget to you away from competitors in such a manner that should offset losses from people cutting out more of the crap inventory. There's also the possibility they don't prioritize giving their ad platform love because it nudges people to PMDs and they have a lot to gain by growing that ecosystem. If your partners are doing all the development work for you to build their own interfaces AND they are driving more media sales, that might be enough to drive a strategic shift away from their own platform. I'd be very shocked if this were the case though.

blahi 10y ago

There's a package in R that connects to the API. Native dataframes, dplyr, the best visualizations out there and rmarkdown notebooks and flexdashboard make it great for things like that.