Match facebook campaign objective with insights actions types

Question

Facebook campaigns have an objective among those listed here (PAGE_LIKES, VIDEO_VIEWS, etc).

Facebook insights list users actions among those listed here (like, video_view, etc, but some are missing, unlike for example).

The problem is: objective and actions do not match. For example, there is a PAGE_LIKES objective and a like action.

In the facebook power manager there is a "Results" column which gives, for each campaign, the user actions count that match the campaign objective (992 like obtained in the picture below).

It seems that there is no such things in the insights (neither in the api nor in the sdk), so what is the proper way to identify a campaign conversion count (named "Results" in the power manager)?

Do we have to manually maintain PAGE_LIKES <-> like? And if it so, what is the correct mapping?

Wynnie

Did you ever find a solution for this? – Jarid

@Jarid Nope. The solution I used is still to manually bind objectives to actions (which fails in couple of cases). Facebook ads api is the worst experience I ever add with programming. An api that barely works, a ui that breaks every imaginable rule of usability and a support team that don't understand anything. Paul Bain's answer bellow is a perfect example of that: the guy refers to an attribute in a doc that don't even exists. – Wynnie

Answer 1

I think you're looking at the wrong doc. You should take a look at the ad insights object reference:

This lists the field results which is defined as:

The number of actions as a result of your advert. The results you see here are based on your objective.

For example, try this:

/<version>/act_<ACT_ID>/campaigns?fields=insights.fields(actions_results,results)

Hyperextension

Are you sure a results field is there? I am not finding it in the page you've provided. And using the insights api with the results field I get the error results is not valid for fields param. All valid values are: date_start, ... – Wynnie

Strange that you can't see the doc, can you try the example I've added above? – Hyperextension

I see the doc, but the results fields is not listed anywhere in it. I don't know where you've found it. Your example doesn't work, I get the error (#803) Cannot query users by their username (campaigns) (which doesn't make any sense). And I'm more looking for a url like /<version>/<campaign_id>/insights?fields=results – Wynnie

sounds like the call you made there was wrong as that error relates to trying to query a user by username, it the URL should look something like: /v2.5/12312312/insights?fields=results – Hyperextension

Forget that error, for a moment, please. The first issue is that you refer to a field results that's not in the doc, where does it comes from? – Wynnie

"results" should work as Paul indicated... there might be a problem with the doc (the field is showing up for me)... but I think if you fix your call, it should just work... – Sunbathe

@Sunbathe using the exact call @Paul Bain provided /<version>/act_<ACT_ID>/campaigns?fields=insights.fields(actions_results,results) I get "(#100) actions_results, results are not valid for fields param. All valid values are: date_start... – Wynnie

@PaulBain how do we write this query in programming lang (If possible, I'm looking for python)? – Shovelnose

I'm only interested for all campaigns + insights – Shovelnose

@PaulBain this answer does not work in version 2.8 or 2.9 of the API and I cannot find a clear way to get Marketing API to give me the result for the objective. Is there any documentation around about how this is mapped together? – Cardcarrying