fb-ad-insights-api-notes.md

Facebook Ad Insights v2.2 API Notes

Ad Report Stats (URL ends with: /reportstats despite its name)

Breakdown columns

Data breakdown columns cannot be used together except for few exceptions. See the table for allowed combinations.

• Cannot fetch: country and age or country and gender

• Can fetch: age and gender (but not age,gender because that's not a column name)

• Cannot fetch spend columns with breakdowns (however error not thrown)

• Age and gender or country can be fetched with action columns, but including action_target_name causes no data to be returned.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/adreportstats/v2.2#columns

Placement and Cross device columns

• Include both placement and impression device columns (however, these two columns have different time range restrictions see below)
• Cannot fetch these columns with age and gender or country breakdown columns

Time restrictions

The API can't provide some data before certain dates:

• any data prior to September 28th 2012,
• actions prior to November 15th 2012,
• demographic data (gender, age) prior to Jan 1st 2013,
• placement data prior to April 24th 2013.
• impression_device and action_device data prior to July 3rd 2014

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/adreportstats/v2.2#restrictions

Immediately fetching (say within <5ms) an Ad Report Stats report after the export says 100% complete can return incomplete data (workaround wait 100ms).