With the latest update for Facebook in preparation for the iOS 14.4 update, you may have noticed all your reporting averages on Facebook are showing up blank.
It’s incredibly difficult to assess campaign performance when you can’t see the averages of how things are performing, so I’m going to walk you through a fix. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an easy way around getting back data for past performances, but as soon as I do you’ll know about it.
Why did the reporting averages disappear?
Before I can explain how to fix them, I need to explain what happened.
Because of the upcoming changes, Facebook has adjusted all the attribution windows (basically how long they track data to see if someones purchased) to 7 days. You used to be able to track up to 28 days – which was perfect for those with longer purchase cycles.
Unfortunately for us, when they rolled out this change, they changed all of your past ads to 28 days. So the reason you are no longer seeing your averages is due to ‘mixed attribution settings’ – which is absurd, given you used to be able to see averages for mixed attribution previously.
But I digress.
How to fix the missing reporting averages
Before I can explain how to fix them, I need to explain what happened.
Firstly, this comes with some caveats. It’s annoying and a little painful and not a perfect solution. BUT it will give you your averages with some fiddling around.
You’ll want to adjust your columns to sort by “Performance”
Once you’ve done that, you’ll see a new column called “Attribution Setting” – here you’ll see a mix of attribution settings. As I mentioned above, the problem is that they don’t all match.
From here you’ll need to go into every single campaign that doesn’t have “7-day click or 1-day view” as it’s attribution setting and edit them.
What’ll you’ll find is that it will be mostly inactive ad sets that are causing issues. You can just delete them, but I like to keep the data just in case – not that it’s easy to access at the moment. But in case Facebook releases a fix, I like to keep it there just in case.
You’ll then want to select ‘Edit’ on the ad sets with the outdated attribution settings. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, hit “show more options” and then you’ll see your attribution settings.
You’ll then click edit, and select “7 days after clicking or 1 day after viewing”.
NOTE: If you’re Facebook plays up like mine did and it’s showing in your columns as 28 days, but when you go to edit it, it’s correct, you’ll need to change it to another option – perhaps 1-day click. Publish those changes. And then edit again to change it to “7-day click 1-day view” – told you this was a painful process. But we are nearly there!
What to do if you have dozens of ad sets?
If you have a large number of ad sets that are showing the wrong attribution, don’t worry, you don’t have to do this one by one. Simply go campaign by campaign, bulk tick all the ad sets that need changing (those tick boxes down the left-hand side), and hit the edit button in the top menu bar. You can then edit them all.
The last step
Once all that’s done, you can go back to your main campaign window and you’ll notice that you still don’t see the averages.
What you need to do is use the filter section and search by “had delivery” – that’ll show you just the ads in your specified time frame.
Alternatively, you can use the checkboxes and use the filter by “selection”.
You should then have all your campaign averages back!
Ta-da!
Troubleshooting
So, if after all that you still don’t have your averages there are a few things you can do.
- Try a hard reset on your ad account. Click the little cog – top right-hand corner – and select ‘reset ad manager’ – just make sure you don’t have any draft ads you want to keep as you will lose them
- If that doesn’t work you’ll need to go through everything that’s live with a fine-tooth comb, somewhere there will be an ad set hiding that doesn’t have the right attribution.
The only way we have found to get all campaign data back is to go through EVERY SINGLE AD SET and follow these steps, which as you can imagine is incredibly painful. But you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do sometimes.
Hopefully, Facebook has a fix for this soon, but in the meantime, it’ll help you to get your ad account averages back so you aren’t flying blind!
