Starter plan & up

Meta data is stale or empty

Why Meta Ads data may appear delayed, partial, or missing in Ordinary — and what to do.

Ordinary Written by The Ordinary Team · Updated

Meta data is stale or empty

Meta’s reporting APIs are eventually consistent and occasionally flaky. Here’s what’s typical, what’s a bug, and how to fix it.

Normal delays

  • Today’s data refreshes hourly. If you check at 2pm and see metrics through ~1pm, that’s expected.
  • Yesterday’s data finalizes each morning. Meta itself takes 3-6 hours after midnight UTC to close their reporting windows.
  • First sync after connection pulls 60 days and takes 3-10 minutes.

If you’re inside these windows, wait — it’s not a bug.

”Needs reauth” on the Meta card

Meta access tokens expire every 60 days unless your Business Manager has long-lived tokens enabled. When ours expires, you’ll see a yellow Needs reauth badge on Settings → Integrations → Meta.

Fix: click Reconnect and reapprove the permissions. Sync resumes automatically.

Spend shows zero for yesterday

Most common causes:

  1. Reauth needed (see above).
  2. Ad account paused — if all campaigns were paused, spend is legitimately zero.
  3. Wrong ad account connected — double-check the account name on Settings → Integrations → Meta matches the one running ads.
  4. Meta’s closing delay — if it’s early morning UTC, yesterday’s final numbers may not be in yet.

Campaigns missing from the list

  • Archived campaigns — we only show Active + Paused by default. Toggle “Show archived” in the Campaigns → Meta filter.
  • Filtered out by status — check the status filter at the top of the page.
  • New campaign just created — Meta’s API lags ~5-10 minutes behind the Ads Manager UI.

Ad-set or ad-level data missing but campaigns show up

We pull campaigns first, then ad-sets, then ads. On first sync or after a long outage, ad-level data may take an extra few minutes to backfill.

Wait 10 minutes, then force a resync: Settings → Integrations → Meta → Refresh now.

Numbers don’t match Meta Ads Manager

This is expected — we’re two different measurement systems. See Campaigns — Meta ads § Click-through vs view-through.

In short: Meta uses view-through + cross-device identity; Ordinary uses click-based pixel data. They’ll never match exactly, and usually Ordinary is closer to truth.

Still broken

If you’ve waited past normal delays and reauthed successfully:

  • Note the campaign name and date range where data looks wrong.
  • Note the last time you saw data update.
  • Email sales@tryordinary.com.

We can check our Meta sync job logs for your account and often find the exact point where sync lagged.

Did this answer your question?

Thanks for your feedback! 🙌

Related articles