Tableau is a powerful business intelligence and data visualization tool but lacks native connectivity to key marketing data sources like Facebook Ads. However, with some coding work it is possible to pull Meta Ads data into Tableau for deeper analysis.

This blog article is written for Meta Ads managers who wish to explore the powerful features of Tableau for reporting. It also explains how to make this connection and outlines the key benefits.

Importance of Connecting Meta Ads to Tableau

Many marketers find Meta Business Manager lacking when it comes to visualizing and analyzing campaign performance trends. Exporting the data into Tableau opens up far more flexibility in terms of building custom dashboards and spotting issues.

Other key reasons to connect Meta Ads to Tableau include:

• Reporting to management/teams/clients – Tableau has superior reporting and data visualization capabilities compared to Business Manager.
• View performance for multiple ad accounts – With the data compiled in Tableau, you can view metrics across different business units or client accounts to spot overall trends.
• Combine with other data sources – Bring together your Meta Ads data with other sources like Google Ads, and CRM data for a unified view of marketing performance.
• Automated extracts – Manually exporting data from Business Manager is time consuming. Automated API extracts into Tableau save a significant amount of time.

CONTACT US TO GET THIS SOLUTION

Who Stands to Benefit

A Meta Ads to Tableau Connector is most valuable for:

• Ecommerce brands – Improve campaign performance by better analyzing the data in Tableau.
• Agencies – Manage client accounts more effectively with unified reporting.
• Marketing teams – Report performance across business units and spot overall trends.

How to Connect Meta Ads to Tableau

The process to Connect Meta Ads to Tableau involves writing code to query the Facebook Marketing API and pull the data into Tableau. Here are the steps that you should follow.

1. Review the Facebook Marketing API documentation to understand what data is available.
2. Write authentication code to securely access the API. This has a two-step process – first requesting an access token, then specifying data access permissions. Python is a good language choice.
3. Write code for each API endpoint you want to extract into Tableau. The ‘insights’ endpoint contains campaign metrics like clicks and spend at the campaign, ad set and ad levels.
4. Next, you will need to schedule regular data refreshes for the Meta Ads to Tableau Connector. The Facebook API has rate limits that need to be considered to avoid failures.
5. As Facebook updates their API specification, minor code tweaks will be needed over time to keep the connector working smoothly.

The above outlines the process but does require specialized coding skills. As an alternative, expert services from us are available. We can help you to handle the setup and ongoing maintenance of a Meta Ads Tableau connector.

Key Tables and Metrics

The most valuable Facebook Marketing API endpoint is ‘insights’, which contains campaign performance metrics. As well as default metrics like clicks and impressions, you can customize this to include breakdowns like age/gender, plus additional metrics like CPM, CPC and more.

The ‘creative’ endpoint can provide thumbnail images to incorporate into Tableau campaign reports.

There are many other API tables covering targeting, budgets, audiences and more that can be valuable to pull into Tableau.

CONTACT US TO GET THIS SOLUTION

Using Meta Ads Data in Tableau

With the API data loaded into Tableau, typical use cases include:

• Building campaign performance dashboards with trends over time, comparisons across campaigns, drilldowns by age ranges etc.
• Incorporating thumbnail images of top performing creative.
• Blending in additional data sources like website analytics to analyze the sales impact of campaigns.
• Automated report generation to provide unified insights across client accounts.

Tableau opens up deep analysis of Meta Ads data that is just not possible within Business Manager alone.

Our Meta Ads Tableau connector extracts the data from all of these tables and more. Contact us today to learn more about this solution.

Overcoming Access and Rate Limit Challenges

Extracting data from the Facebook Marketing API comes with some technical hurdles to overcome in terms of access levels and rate limits.

Access Levels

The API has different tiers of access depending on how much data you want to extract:

• Basic – only your owned Facebook pages
• Standard – owned Facebook pages plus Instagram accounts connected to your Facebook business
• Premium – standard access plus data from client accounts you manage campaigns for

For most use cases, Premium access is recommended. This does require getting special permissions from your clients by becoming a Facebook Marketing Partner.

Rate Limits

The API has usage restrictions to prevent excessive load on Facebook’s servers:

• 200 requests per access token per hour
• 16Mb max response size per request

With large amounts of Facebook ad account data, these limits can quickly be reached, leading to failures. Techniques to prevent this include:

• Monitoring API latency and error rates to throttle requests if limits approached
• Segmenting requests across multiple access tokens to increase capacity
• Extracting specific date ranges per request to reduce data volumes
• Compressing responses before the 16Mb max size is reached

Careful orchestration of extract pacing and segmentation is needed to smoothly collect large volumes of campaign data from the API within the imposed restrictions.

When we install our Tableau Meta Ads connector for our clients, we take care of all of these issues while scheduling refresh. Contact us to learn more.

Enhanced Analysis Combining Meta and Google Ads Data

Many companies run paid campaigns across both Facebook and Google platforms. While getting Meta Ads into Tableau greatly increases analysis capabilities, even deeper insights can be gained by connecting additional marketing data sources.

Google Ads is equally as important as Meta Ads for many businesses. Luckily, Tableau offers a native Google Ads connector that connects directly to your Google account with minimal setup.

With both data sources available within Tableau, some analysis opportunities include:

• Comparing Meta vs Google performance for the same campaign periods, audiences, and objectives. Look for stronger performing platforms to shift investment towards.
• Analyzing user paths across the two channels using UTM campaign tagging. See the influence each has on conversions.
• Building statistical models to understand sales uplift driven specifically by the paid campaigns.
• Uncovering common audiences across the platforms for tighter optimization of spend.
• Gaining a holistic view of marketing performance rather than siloed platform reporting.

The capabilities of Tableau can transform campaign analysis when leveraged to its full potential across all available data. Connecting to other marketing datasets unlocks deeper insights into omni-channel performance and attribution.

Conclusion

Connecting Meta Ads to Tableau requires coding knowledge but offers huge benefits in terms of campaign performance analysis and reporting. As an alternative to handling this internally, specialist services from Vidi Corp provide a fully managed connector with ongoing support.

CONTACT US TO GET THIS SOLUTION