Introduction
Meta Ads (formerly Facebook Ads) is Meta’s paid advertising platform, covering Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network. It supports a wide range of campaign objectives — awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion, sales — across CPC, CPM, CPA, and oCPM payment models. Advertisers run paid social campaigns through Meta Ads Manager, and the connector imports the resulting structure and performance data via the Meta Marketing API (Graph API v25.0). As a marketing connector, metrics, breakdowns, and currencies are standardized so widgets can aggregate across sources without additional configuration. To connect this data source, see How to connect Meta Ads to Adriel.Data refresh strategy
Architecture data
Architecture covers ad accounts, campaigns, ad sets, and ads. It refreshes every 4 hours, on the hour (UTC). Only campaigns created within the last 30 months are imported.Reports data
Reports include daily performance metrics for ad accounts, campaigns, ad sets, and ads. Real-time. Report data is fetched from Meta on demand when a dashboard loads, so the latest values are always visible. On top of that, scheduled cache refreshes keep historical data consistent across multiple time windows. Refresh schedule. Reports refresh on three overlapping schedules:- 5:00 PM UTC daily — syncs the last 9 days for ad account, campaign, ad set, and ad
- 11:40 PM and 6:40 AM UTC daily — syncs the last 3 days for ad account, campaign, ad set, and ad
- 7:30 AM UTC on the 1st and 15th of each month — syncs the last 30 days for ad account, campaign, ad set, and ad
Architecture levels
Ad account → Campaign → Ad set → AdDate range limits
Attribution windows
Meta Ads conversion metrics are reported across multiple attribution windows. The connector requests four windows by default: 7-day click, 1-day click, 7-day view, and 1-day view. When the workspace flag for extended Meta attribution is enabled, 28-day click and 28-day view windows are added; contact Adriel to enable it. Each attribution window produces a separate metric variant. For example,purchase exists as Purchase (Click, 1d), Purchase (Click, 7d), Purchase (View, 1d), and so on.
Metrics
How to read the columnsData type uses Adriel’s vocabulary — Number, Currency, Percentage, Ratio, Duration, Date, Text, URL, Array, Boolean. API Key in code style like
impressions is the literal Meta Graph API field; where the same raw field name is shared across objects (Meta returns name for the ad account, ad, ad set, and campaign), it’s shown qualified as object.field (for example account.name) so each row stays unique; italic marks a value Adriel computes or derives. Some raw fields back several metrics — notably actions (one array Meta filters by action type) and creative (the ad’s creative object) — so the same key can appear on multiple rows; that’s the shared source field, not a duplicated entry. Currency values are reported in each ad account’s configured Meta currency.Basic
Campaign Attributes
UTM values are parsed by Adriel, not returned by Meta. Adriel reads the UTM query parameters from each ad’s landing URL and exposes them as both metrics (for rollup) and breakdowns (for grouping).
Campaign Structure
Click Performance
Computed Metric
These are calculated by Adriel from other metrics; they have no single underlying Meta field.
Conversion Performance
Conversion events come from your Pixel. Adriel can only display conversion events that Ad Manager already receives; if a Pixel records an event but does not forward it to Ad Manager, that event will not appear in Adriel. Meta exposes 17 standard Pixel events (Meta Pixel standard events reference); for each, a count and a value metric are generated across every enabled attribution window (see Attribution windows). Any custom conversions active in the ad account are imported as well.
Engagement
Impression Click Performance
Video Performance
Meta Ads-specific
These metrics exist only for Meta Ads and aren’t part of any cross-connector category. Every group above is a standard category shared with other connectors.
Breakdowns
Basic
Campaign Structure
Creatives
Adriel post-processes ad creatives to generate these breakdowns.
Date
Meta’s API returns daily records; all time-grouping breakdowns are Adriel-side aggregations of the same underlying daily data.
Others
Meta Ads-specific
These breakdowns exist only for Meta Ads and aren’t part of any cross-connector category. Every group above is a standard category shared with other connectors.
UTM breakdowns are Adriel-parsed. Meta doesn’t return UTM values; Adriel parses them from each ad’s landing URL and exposes them for grouping.
Post Comment ID is not cached. Queries using the Post Comment ID breakdown always hit Meta live and may run slower than cache-backed queries.Breakdown × level compatibility
Breakdown × level incompatibility. Most breakdowns cannot be queried at the ad set or ad level due to Meta API constraints. Attempting to do so returns
INVALID_DIMENSIONS_COMBINATION (Meta Insights breakdowns).Limitations
- 30-month campaign recency filter — only campaigns created within the last 30 months are imported; older campaigns are not available in the connector.
- No deleted-data exclusion — historical data for deleted campaigns / ad sets / ads is preserved.
- No data-size limit — the connector adaptively chunks wide queries; there is no hard row-count cap on a single query.
- No historical date-range limit on report data specifically — the practical limit is the 30-month campaign recency filter above, plus Meta API-side limits (typically 37 months of historical data for aggregate metrics — Meta Marketing API Insights limits & best practices).
API references (Meta)
- Meta Marketing API Insights
- Campaign insights reference
- Ad set insights reference
- Ad insights reference
- Generic breakdowns
- Insights API breakdowns
See also
- How to connect Meta Ads to Adriel (paired how-to)
- Facebook Page Organic data reference — for organic Page metrics
- Instagram Organic data reference — for organic Instagram metrics
