Campaigns — Facebook / Meta ads
How to read your Meta Ads spend, performance, and attribution in Ordinary once the Meta integration is connected.
Written by The Ordinary Team · Updated Campaigns — Facebook / Meta ads
Meta campaign reporting requires Starter or higher and a connected Meta Ads account. See Connecting Meta Ads.
Once Meta is connected, Ordinary pulls your campaign, ad-set, and ad-level data and cross-references it with pixel-observed attribution. Left nav → Campaigns → Meta.
The list view
One row per campaign. Columns:
- Campaign name
- Status (Active / Paused / etc. — read directly from Meta)
- Spend — cumulative in the date range, in your display currency
- Impressions, Clicks, CTR
- Orders attributed — sessions that had this campaign in the UTM chain and led to an order, using the currently-selected attribution model
- Revenue attributed — sum of those orders’ revenue
- ROAS — Revenue attributed / Spend
Click any row to drill down.
The detail view
The campaign-detail page has tabs for:
- Ad sets + ads — same columns as the campaign row, drilling through to the ad-level view. Time-series chart of spend vs. revenue across the date range.
- Creative Library — thumbnails, copy text, and per-creative performance for every ad in the campaign. See Meta deep analytics § Creative library.
- Placement Breakdown — performance split across Facebook Feed, Instagram Feed, Stories, Reels, Audience Network, etc. See Meta deep analytics § Placement breakdown.
- Demographic Breakdown — age and gender split for the campaign. See Meta deep analytics § Demographic breakdown.
- Configuration History — daily snapshots of budget, status, audience, and optimisation goal so you can correlate performance changes against config changes. See Meta deep analytics § Campaign configuration history.
- Conversion Gap — Meta-reported vs. Ordinary store-attributed conversions side-by-side, so you can see how much of Meta’s reported lift is view-through / cross-device modelled vs. click-driven against your authoritative orders. See Attribution reports § Platform-reported vs store-attributed.
- Cohort & LTV — customers acquired by this campaign grouped by first-purchase month, with cumulative revenue forward. Answers “did this campaign acquire customers who come back?” See Attribution reports § Cohort and lifetime-value view.
Attribution model
The model selector at the top of the page affects the “Orders attributed” and “Revenue attributed” columns. Same four models as the main attribution report — last-click (default), first-click, linear, time-decay.
See Attribution models explained.
Click-through vs view-through (why Meta’s numbers don’t match)
Across your whole Meta account, Meta’s reporting will usually show more conversions than Ordinary’s Click-through view — that’s expected, the two are counting different things:
- Click-through — someone clicked your ad and bought. Ordinary confirms these against your own store, so they’re conversions you can verify.
- View-through — someone saw your ad, didn’t click, and bought later. Only Meta can see these, so Ordinary reports Meta’s figure.
The Click-through / View-through toggle — in the page header on Campaigns → Meta and on the Meta scorecard on your home dashboard — switches between the two. View-through is the default (it’s the number Meta’s dashboard and most agencies quote); Click-through is the store-verified floor underneath it.
A couple of other things move the numbers:
- Attribution window — Meta’s default is 7-day click + 1-day view (configurable per ad account). Ordinary doesn’t truncate at a few days the way the platform does — it credits the actual last ad click in the customer’s journey under your chosen model, looking back up to 180 days. Different window and different method, so the counts won’t line up one-to-one.
- Cross-device — Meta deduplicates users across devices via their identity graph. Ordinary treats each browser as its own session stream until the shopper authenticates at checkout and we can link them.
- A single campaign can occasionally flip — show more click-verified orders in Ordinary than Meta reports for it. That’s last-click crediting the campaign that got the final click in the journey, while Meta spreads credit across everything the shopper saw. It evens out across your whole account, so compare totals there for the cleanest read; per-campaign, treat Ordinary’s click-verified number as the one you can stand behind and the gap vs. Meta as directional.
They almost never match exactly, and the gap is where the real decision lives: view-through might be genuinely driving demand, or it might be sales you’d have made anyway. Ordinary’s experiments measure the true incremental lift of your spend, so “is view-through worth it?” stops being a guess. For reconciliation, use Meta for delivery metrics (impressions, CTR, CPC) and Ordinary for outcome metrics (orders, revenue, ROAS).
What if ad spend looks zero
- Connection expired — check Settings → Integrations → Meta. If it says “Needs reauth,” click Reconnect.
- Date range past your plan’s lookback — partial data badge will show.
- Meta sync hasn’t run yet — initial sync can take 10-20 minutes. See Meta data is stale or empty.