This blog is for those of us who need to build reports that visualise data, and have Facebook conversion campaigns with custom conversions set up in the pixel. If you’re not doing any of these yet, you might like to read our blogs on setting up a Data Studio Report, or paid social advertising.
Data Studio is by far the most customisable and flexible tool we’ve found. It’s easy to use and free. Because of the wide array of connectors, Data Studio isn’t limited to only Google products. We use the Supermetrics connector to report on our clients’ paid Facebook campaigns.
I’ll assume you’ve already added Facebook as a data source to your report, via the Supermetrics connector. If you rely on custom conversions in your Facebook campaigns, it’s not immediately apparent how to find these in Google Data Studio. There is a simple workaround using Data Studio filters.
First, add a chart (I personally love a line graph), and then select your dimension (I’ve chosen date), and choose “actions” as the metric. The actions metric includes basically any action that happens as a result of your ad – including website conversions.
Now we need to visit Facebook to find our custom conversions in Events Manager. It can be a bit confusing to find because it depends on how your menu is set up – below are two examples of where the Events Manager can be found:
Once you’re there, go to your “custom conversions” page, and find the names of your custom conversions.
The main Event Manager view should look something like this:
Your custom conversions view should look something like this:
Note the name of the custom conversion you want to track, and come back to Data Studio. Create a new filter that includes only actions with this name. You can create a new filter by clicked “add a filter” in the RHS menu:
Remember these are case and space sensitive, so it has to be exactly the same as the name in Facebook. For this exercise, I want to track “Initiated Search”. Build the filter to include all action types that contain or match your custom conversion name, like this:
Once you’ve set up the filter, your graph should look a bit different – if it looks exactly the same it might be an indication that the filter hasn’t worked. If it all looks good, go ahead and rename the metric so you can keep track of what your filter is actually measuring:
You can create filters for every custom conversion you need to track, and rename the action metric for each chart, so that you can easily see how your Facebook campaigns are getting the custom conversions you want.
This isn’t the only possible way to pull custom conversions into Google Data Studio – there are a few alternatives floating about online. If this method doesn’t work for you, keep trying, or give us a shout and we can help.
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