Facebook Ads are ads served up to Facebook users based on their activity, demographic information, device use information, advertising and marketing partner-supplied information, and off-Facebook activity. The platform includes reporting tools that let you see what impact your ads have.

Google Data Studio is a simple dashboard and reporting tool. It's free and easy to use, but it lacks the sophisticated features of higher-end reporting software. Many of the connectors it supports are for Google products, but third parties have written partner connectors to a wide variety of data sources. Its drag-and-drop report editor lets users create about 15 types of charts.

Data can be retrieved programmatically via the Facebook Ads Insights API, which is available to anyone who uses the platform. Don't confuse this with the API Facebook offers for placing and managing ads, which is not relevant to our purposes.

By following the process in the API documentation, you can make calls to the Ads Insights API to retrieve your data. You'll have access to endpoints such as impressions, clickthrough rates, and CPC, all broken out by time period.

Below is an example of what that response might look like when you query the Ads Insights API.

{
   "data": [
      {
         "impressions": "1862555",
         "adset_name": "My ad set",
         "cost_per_action_type": [
            {
               "action_carousel_card_name": "My Carousel Card 1",
               "action_type": "app_custom_event.fb_mobile_activate_app",
               "value": 0.093347346315861
            },
            {
               "action_carousel_card_name": "My Carousel Card 2",
               "action_type": "app_custom_event.fb_mobile_activate_app",
               "value": 0.38324089579301
            },
            ...
         ],
      }
   ]
}

Google Data Studio uses what it calls "connectors" to gain access to data. Data Studio comes bundled with 17 connectors, mostly to pull in data from other Google products. It also supports connectors to MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and offers 200 connectors to other data sources built and supported by partners.

Google Data Studio provides a graphical canvas onto which users drag and drop datasets. Users can set dimensions and metrics, specify sorting and filtering, and tailor the way reports and charts are displayed.

At this point you've coded up a script or written a program to get the data you want and successfully moved it into your data warehouse. But how will you load new or updated data? It's not a good idea to replicate all of your data each time you have updated records. That process would be painfully slow and resource-intensive.

Instead, identify key fields that your script can use to bookmark its progression through the data and use to pick up where it left off as it looks for updated data. Auto-incrementing fields such as updated_at or created_at work best for this. When you've built in this functionality, you can set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to get new data as it appears in Facebook Ads.

And remember, as with any code, once you write it, you have to maintain it. If Facebook modifies its API, or the API sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.