10 tools to automate your facebook ad account data into Bigquery, Tableau, Google Sheets and data studio
Before few years, it is about how we can manually export the data from Facebook ads manager and paste in Excel or Google sheet for reporting and analysis. Now there are multiple tools and approaches to automate this facebook ad transfer especially to bigquery, tableau, Google sheet,etc.
Why do we need these Facebook ads Data automation?
- The important benefit of this usage is saving time. Time is especially very limited for a startup with less resource
- Easy to scale the same approach whether you are a boutique agency or multi-brand owner who owns more than dozens of account or even a single account also still helpful.
- That’s an efficiency way, Why do you want a human to sit and prepare your reports every day when you can automate? Instead, we can enjoy our time in a more productive way than spending time manually on this.
- In advanced analysis especially for machine learning and multiple data connection between different marketing/crm tools, we need a proper marketing datawarehouse
- There is a simple use case like budget monitoring or creative report to Predictive data modelling/natural language processing that can be only achieved if we a have proper data infrastructure. Especially in marketing, it is critical as we are the one who strategizes the growth of the company by collecting audience data to analysing.
The reason why i choose Facebook to start with this series of data automation post is that Google products have been made easier to transfer(ready-made connectors) as Google has it own data warehouse like Bigquery. and Facebook is one of the second marketing channel providers where our money is spent and we need those data as well.
Also, Each one of us works in different technology stack, so am going to share short snippets of every possible way and so you can explore further on this. This information provided here is only an awareness of different approaches and not a in-depth explanation as each company mentioned below has more expert posts than I can provide.
Transferring to Google Sheet only Stack:
You may just want to transfer the data directly into google sheet in an automated(hourly/daily) fetch for simple reporting like budget monitoring, creative report, or simple analysis from multiple facebook ad accounts data. For this case, the best and affordable ways are
- Supermetrics (Paid).
- Blockspring (Paid)
- Singer.io ( Opensource, coding knowledge required)
Transferring directly to BigQuery
Usages like the advanced analysis from 100+ accounts with terabytes of data, building a marketing data warehouse for business intelligence (BI) or for any machine learning analysis where analyst wanted to pull numbers into their R Studio or Python environment, it is efficient to fetch data from Bigquery or any storage solutions. There are multiple ways to do from Manually writing api to automate, so I would recommend considering ready-made solutions as it is easy to start faster
- Stitchdata (Bulk transfer for all data)
- Alooma (Write a schema and then transfer the required data) (alooma is recently bought over by google, so here is alternatives)
- Singer.io ( Opensource, coding knowledge required)
Transferring to Google Sheet and then to Bigquery
Cases like where you want to clean these data before it gets passed to Bigquery, you need some environment, Google has it’s beta solution of data prep to do this but not everyone can afford to expertise to achieve this or even you can do SQL queries to clean and merge data directly in Bigquery interface but you want the simplest solution where everyone can play a part in cleaning. Anyway, it’s up to your requirements. So you can
- Use Supermetrics/blockspring/singer to import data into Google sheet, (Clean, merge or do the custom calculation)
- Then automate your google sheet into Bigquery. Simple explanation on how to do that from google https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2017/09/how-to-crunch-your-business-data-from-sheets-in-bigquery
Transferring into Tableau directly
What If you are already using business intelligence tool like tableau and your company is not in google environment and Microsoft product. simple..
- Stitchdata https://www.stitchdata.com/integrations/facebook-ads/tableau/
- Cognetik, I never tried this though but looks very straightforward alhttp://cognetik.com/cloud-tableau-connector
Transferring to Google sheet and then to Tableau
A case you are not a SQL expert 🙂 but you are expert at Excel formula and a big believer in coding is for losers 😀 or your requirement itself has something to do with Google sheet. Similar to Bigquery, Tableau also has a free inbuilt google sheet connector that makes our job easier to connect to Google sheet which means
- Use Supermetrics/blockspring/singer to push the data into google sheet
- Clean, merge, do a custom calculation
- Use Tableau google sheet connector and visualise in Tabluea
Transferring into Bigquery > R Studio/Python Environment > then to Tableau
What if you are a data scientist and expert analyst you want to get the terabytes of data into Bigquery as Google sheet cannot accompany your requirement of more than 2million cells? Or you want to pull data into Bigquery , then push to Rstudio/python environment for further data modeling or prediction algorithms and then push to Tableau.
- Stitchdata/alooma/fivetran/blendco/singer to push data into big query
- Use RStudio/PythonE to connect to big query
- Do your stuff, then push into Bigquery
- Use Tableau inbuilt connector to connect bigquery
Transferring to Microsoft Excel
You may say “My company is not in Google apps environment” or “Google sheet is for kids :D” or “Google sheet has lot of limitation and can be very slow sometimes”. No worries, free tool and paid tools available
Transferring to Google Data Studio directly
Ooh! Finally, the free visualization tool is available 🙂 And for budget users, the perfect love comes from Google.
For direct transfer:
- Facebook Ads by Power My Analytics
- Facebook Ads by Supermetrics
- Ad, Analytics, Social Data by ReportDash
- Adstage
In simple, list of the tools available for transfer to Bigquery, Google Sheet, Snowflake, Microsoft Excel
- singer.io
- Facebook official connector for excel
- Supermetrics
- Blockspring
- Stitchdata
- Alooma (alooma is recently bought over by google, so here is alternatives)
- Owox BI
- Blendo
- Fivetran
- Adstage, I love their blog have been reading for more than 5 years!
Conclusion
If you ask me what you want to start first, I would recommend you to start with supermetrics which i have been using for 3+ years and worth of paying $39 basic package. if it is more for visualisation just go ahead with Data Studio as its free and can still use all google products, if you want more, then you can use supermetrics connectors.
Hope you found this article useful. I would love to hear your thoughts. 😇
Disclaimer: This article was published on 2018 but on 2020, I joined supermetrics partner program and so i added my affiliate links just to get cents for a coffee :)
Originally published at jkbaseer.com on April 10, 2018. Below are my other articles.
Hubspot data to Google sheets and others
