The Facebook Ads REPORTING DELAY is Ruining Your Data! Here's The Fix...

0:00hi guys it's ben heath from lead guru in this video i'm going to talk about how the facebook ads reporting delay that was implemented because of ios 14 might be messing up the data that is coming into your facebook ad account which is going to make it impossible for both you and facebook to optimize your campaigns properly which can have a massive negative impact on your facebook ad results i'll also be talking about what you can do to counteract that what you can do to fix the situation which is obviously super important so if you've seen some weird data coming in through into your facebook ad account that

0:29perhaps doesn't seem accurate or you've seen a drop off in performance i think you're going to find this video very very helpful before i get into it you want to very quickly ask me to smash that like button that really helps me out is much appreciated and of course subscribe to my youtube channel for more facebook advertising related content just like this keeping you up to date and on the cutting edge okay so i'm in facebook support document here on well we're going to run through a number of things and i want you to pay close attention because i think this stuff is really really important if you're

0:55running facebook ads the first thing i'm going to show you is around the reporting delay itself so i'm this is facebook support doc on how the apple ios 14 release may affect your ads and reporting now this was um talked about and this article was released in advance of the rs14 changes we're obviously um past that now but we have seen this come into play so there's tons of information in here i'd encourage you to go through it if you have the time if not i'm going to help you pick out the most important parts i've released videos already on ios 14 and the changes but this is a

1:25specific element that not a lot of facebook advertisers are aware of i'm going to go ahead and click on this reporting limitations section right and what i'm going to focus on here is delayed reporting so what you can see is facebook say here real-time reporting will not be supported and data may be delayed up to three days now we have seen a reporting delay come into effect no question about it has is it three days that doesn't seem to be that long from what we can see but one of the things i'm hearing a lot of facebook advertisers say is they will say things like the data that i'm seeing in my facebook

2:00ad account does not match let's say the conversions i'm generating when i look at my shopify store or my google analytics data or verify it with another data source and i think a lot of that is some inaccuracy and we're going to get on to what that means in a minute but also a lot of that is simply a reporting delay like if you're trying to match up the conversions that took place today in your ad account with the conversions that took place say today within your crm or shopify they may not match because of the reporting delay it may take a few days for that

2:29data to filter through to your ad account now obviously this doesn't affect all campaign types it's mainly app installed campaigns and then of course um conversion campaigns which i know will be a lot of the campaigns that you guys are running but that's the first thing to think about is that there is a reporting delay okay that's first part so remember that second part we're gonna go on to is around model data so we know in fact let me click over here now we know that the people that are ios 14 and above users or even people within the european union you can see facebook talks about it here

3:01recent regulations and industry announcements show how privacy and data expectations are evolving examples such as changes include the att app transfer app tracking transparency requirements which was all about the ios 14 stuff that's the prompt that popped up that you've almost certainly seen by now if you have an iphone um from apple and in the european region the e privacy directive um both of which prohibit certain stuff so people within the a lot of people within the eu and i said most of the ios 14 users um we're not able to as accurately track their data so we've got the reporting delay and we've got the fact that we

3:36can't accurately track the actions that those people are taking on our website those two things combined are leading to facebook using or creating modeled conversions right so what exactly does that mean well we don't quite know facebook if you read through this document which again is something i could recommend facebook's fairly vague i mean look you can see this how conversion modeling works section here and they say modeling uses aggregated data from different sources to account for conversions we're unable to count directly due to various factors including cross-site tracking limitations the various factors being the two things i talked about the lack of data from not being able to track

4:14those people and also the reporting delay which is uh i said under appreciated but a significant part of this so what's facebook doing they're basically making a very educated guess in a lot of scenarios so the data that you are seeing within your facebook ad account particularly when you first launch a facebook ad campaign is going to be a mixture of well delayed and absent which is leading facebook to fill in the halls with model data so what's facebook doing here i think we can fairly safely assume as i said we're not 100 sure but we can fairly safely assume that facebook has all sorts of

4:50data like we know that stores like yours when they advertise let's say they've got a shopify store they converted a 1.8 conversion rate from traffic to conversions therefore we're going to assume that in our model calculation okay they're also going to use tons of other factors so it's going to be more accurate than just a blanket average but that's what they're going to use so if for example facebook can see that they've sent you you know 100 clicks that day they may be registering you may see two purchases within your ad account and then you actually look at shopify store and you're like hang on i

5:22generated five purchases or hang on i generated no purchases that's inaccurate and you're right it's because the reporting delay means that the real data hasn't come through yet where you have it and there's some data holes so facebook's filling those in so particularly when a campaign is new or an ad said is new it's very easy to look at your data and be like that's just not accurate that's just not right there's that doesn't match up to reality and that's led a lot of facebook advertisers to be really frustrated and think is facebook just lying are they making stuff up and they they kind of are

5:54making stuff up to some extent but there are ways that you can significantly reduce the impact of this the first is to fully factor in the reporting delay what does that mean it means you have to wait you have to wait much more than most facebook advertisers previously did to assess performance and then optimize accordingly so if for example you were used to pre-ios 14 running a facebook ad campaign taking a look at the results 12 hours after you launched it or 24 hours after you launched it and making adjustments you can't do that that's just don't do it it's really gonna hurt your results if you do remember if we go

6:33back here the reporting delay can be up to three days as i said i think on average it's quite a bit less than that but it can be up to three days okay that means that you need to wait at least that length of time to assess results ideally significantly more because obviously let's say you're running ads for those three days and then real data starts coming through or you're always playing catch up so i think that unless you're operating with a massive budget and you're getting lots and lots of data coming through faster you want to be assessing results on a seven to ten day

7:06basis minimum could be longer depending on how many conversions for example you're generating but a seven to ten day basis minimum to account for that reporting delay now that's the you part of it here okay that's the as the facebook advertiser i'm gonna be brave i'm going to not adjust things i'm going to not panic and i'm going to wait 7-10 days and what you will find is that the data is much more accurate so if for example you look at today's data in facebook ads versus say what you can see coming through google analytics quite inaccurate but if you look over a two week period there will be a

7:41difference between the two there always says but that difference will be much smaller it won't be like in a one day basis it might be like facebook's saying you generated five conversions generated none or you generated 15. it could be way off it's going to be not quite the same but much more close if that makes sense it also means that you can accurately make assessments so after the seven to ten days you can go in and go oh um add a is performing well add b is not performing well add c is performing well let's pause b let's keep running a and c you can't do that if you start making

8:13adjustments too quickly you just can't do it okay so that's the first thing to to help overcome the reporting delay issues and give it a lot more time it also helps with the model data because i said as facebook gets the data through basically what what seems to be happening is that those first few days facebook will put in model data so basically their best guess and then as the reporting delay sort of as you catch up facebook fills in they they change the data and it becomes more accurate they they as i said over a longer time period you'll see more accurate data coming through it's almost like we've done our

8:48best guess we'll wait for the real data to come in and then we'll put that in there instead it's not quite as clean as that because some data is missing so need to fill in some holes um but that's to some extent what's happening now the other thing i'd recommend you do i'll jump into ads manager so i've created an example campaign here and i've got an example ad set up and i've scrolled down to the modern optimization for an ad delivery section okay um and then we click on the see more options and you can see we've got attribution setting here now i've got a

9:14whole video about attribution setting and what you want to use i'll include a link in the video description below you can check that out but what i recommend you do is you go with seven day click if you want to work out why and which options other options and what they mean check out that video i won't talk about that but go with seven day click gives you more data gives you longer means that facebook is going to be modeling less if you go with one day click basically all that data's modelled very very inaccurate seven-day click is the better option i said you can check

9:38that out but that's something else i wanted to mention now the third thing i want to talk about and if we go down i believe it's down here um in this section oh no i've got the wrong part yes here we go it's in this section here actions you can take i was on the wrong wrong document okay so what can you do to help with the modeled data and we know that the model data is coming in because of the reporting delay which i've already told you how to deal with you just give yourself a lot more time but it's also coming in model data is being used because of the

10:14holes we've got the we can't see exactly what conversions ios 14 users for example are generating so here's what you do first thing is you make sure that you configure your web events in aggregated aggregated event measurement which is all to do with the facebook pixel if you haven't done that already make sure you do it i'll include a link in the description below how to set up your pixel how to verify your domain how to set up your web events in aggregated event measurement it sounds super complicated it's not please go through that video to work it all out the next thing you want to do is set up the

10:43conversions api that's going to help fill in some of the data holes which is the other part of the model data so you've got the reporting delay side of things basically taken care of by giving yourself more time and you've got some of the data holes not all of them helped by setting up aggregate events measurement and installing conversions api i haven't got a video yet on conversions api by the time you're watching this if you're not watching this when it's just come out i may well do so just search my channel or have a look facebook's got information on that you can follow this link and to

11:11get that set up and then yeah those are the actions you can take to help overcome this reporting delay model data issue that as i said may be impacting your ability to optimize because you're doing things too quickly facebook's ability to optimize because they don't have data and that can have a negative impact on results get these things taken care of and you're likely to see significantly better results because of that okay hopefully that wasn't too complicated hopefully you got some nice takeaways from that before you go a couple of things i want to mention the first is a brand new free training i've created called the one facebook ads

11:45technique that will supercharge your results more than anything else and there's a link in the description below it's completely free to go through this uh do this this this webinar and in it i just i demonstrate in full the one technique if someone's coming to me facebook ads and people do all the time because they know i'm in the industry friends of mine who have businesses and things and they'll say what's the one thing that i should work on that i should get right that's going to help me more than anything else it's that i'll show you exactly how to do it so strongly recommend you go through

12:13that webinar completely free it's about 45 minutes long and links in the description well worth your time another thing i want to mention is youtube channel membership so you can now become a member of my youtube channel and members get certain perks like priority replies to comments so there's more comments now being asked on my videos than i can get to so i've had to implement a system where i only dedicate a certain amount of time each day to answering comments and i know these comments are super important to you guys they might be make or break your facebook ad campaigns which is going to impact your business so i

12:45really want to do my best to answer them but obviously there's only so much time in a day so what i'm doing is i'm prioritizing member comments if you go ahead and become a member it costs a small monthly fee you go ahead and become a member i'm gonna basically guarantee as much as i can i may miss one from time to time but i'm gonna guarantee that answer all member comments and then the time i have left over i'm gonna answer the other comments from that from non-members so if you've got questions for me you want your comments answered um it's a very cost-effective way much more than say my

13:11consulting sessions to get those answers is to become a member of my youtube channel and i'll answer those first and it also you also get access to member-only polls so i'm going to ask people members um what content they want me to create so if you want to have a say in that then that's a great way to do it and and also you get to support my channel i've had hundreds of people over the years say um really appreciate your content how can i help out it's all free et cetera et cetera that's how you can become a member help support the channel helps me

13:39create better quality videos dedicate more time to it that'd be much appreciated so if you're interested just click the join button beneath this video that'll bring up a window that basically you won't join immediately you can just find out the information about it and see if it's right for you or not if you do become a member fantastic if you found this video useful thumbs up always thumbs up that really helps me out and subscribe to the channel if you're new and haven't done so already i release facebook ads related content all the time really important stuff like this that you have to know have to get right if

14:05you want the best results particularly as more changes are happening to facebook ads and comment below whether you become a member or not comment below i see all the comments i'll answer as many as i can and and yeah thanks guys bye for now