Import Facebook Cost Data to Google Analytics

Key Takeaways

there are a few third-party tools out there that can automatically import your facebook cost data into google analytics but you're gonna have to pay for these tools and yes these third-party tools can save you a lot of time but it doesn't take a lot of effort to manually import your facebook cost data into google analytics so this video is going to show you the step-by-step instructions on how you can do that i'm starting off in the data import section of google analytics first now we're going to come back to this section when we're actually importing the data into google analytics but i want to show you what type of metrics we can upload into google analytics from facebook and what you're seeing right now is the majority of options we have to upload into google analytics and i'm specifically looking at the id columns that you're seeing on the screen right now so the first three options the date and the source in the medium are mandatory columns that must be imported the next section we have to upload at least one additional option and that is one option of either clicks cost or impressions we're talking about uploading cost data here so we're obviously going to pick costs but we can upload those other two metrics too and then scrolling down a little bit these are just a handful of the options that we can also add not all of them are going to work with facebook but it gives you an idea of some additional information you may be able to upload for any non-google channel that you may want to use this for so campaign and ad content could be appealing to upload from your facebook campaigns and i'll show you how to add a few of these columns once we get into facebook so let's jump in there right now so i'm in this particular facebook ads account and let's say this client of mine wants to upload all their cost data from q1 of 2020. so we just looked at google analytics which metrics are allowed to be imported into google analytics so if we look at this default screen i have right here i don't need all these columns downloaded just gonna be a waste of my time to filter through all this the easiest thing to do in this situation is to create a custom report that you can save and continuously go back and just download a different date range so let me show you how to do that first let's go to reports and then let's create a custom report if we look at the breakdown campaign name is already set and the campaign name wasn't a mandatory item that we have to upload into google analytics but it's one i highly recommend so i'm going to leave that one checked but one of the mandatory metrics we do have to upload is going to be the date and i'm going to choose day the reason i would want to choose day because once we're all done and you have all your cost data imported into google analytics this will allow you to view that cost data at the most in-depth level for the date as possible and then we can search for other metrics pretty easily i'll just choose one of the link clicks we have our ad spend already there you may look for cost but facebook calls it amount spent our impressions already checked and then i'm just going to uncheck some of the other columns that they already have checked that i don't need if that's good enough for now i could save this report and if we want we can name our report so we can come back to it later and now let's export this report remember how i said that the client wanted to import the cost data for q1 of 2020 so make sure that your date range is the proper range that you want and now we can export this initial export it won't matter which format you choose because we are going to have to reformat one more time before uploading it into google analytics so you can just hit export and our report is downloaded so let's open it up i already removed a few additional columns that snuck in there that we don't need for the data import but already there's gonna have to be a few other columns that we add as well as some information and format that we need to change the first thing we need to do is change how the date is formatted so the dates that i have highlighted right here will not be accepted by google analytics so highlight all the dates in that column let's click on format cells and instead of going to the date category we actually need to go to a custom category and your date needs to be formatted like this in the type section add four y's it's gonna be for the year then two m's this is for the month and then two d's for the date and you can see in the sample right above the type that is how your date should be formatted let's click ok and now that column is set so now we have our date and that was one of the mandatory columns that we need to add there were two other additional columns that were mandatory when we first looked at google analytics in the beginning of this video and these columns we're going to have to add manually so let's add two columns and these are going to serve as our columns for our source and our medium imports so in this account we have the sources facebook and we have the medium as cpc to make things easier you can just highlight both of those cells hover over the tiny green square until you see the black plus button and double click and that will fill in for all the rows within your excel sheet the last thing we need to do is update our column headings because if you looked at the ids when we were in google analytics there was some pretty specific formatting for each of the columns and those column ids must be formatted exactly if there's an additional space if you're capitalizing something wrong or you're missing capitalization on a certain letter your whole data import file will be rejected so as you see right now i am updating all the column headers to be exactly how they're supposed to be for google analytics the last two columns that we see for our cost and our clicks those are the ones that can be a little tricky and just remembering what the column id header should be but for now i'm pretty sure everything is looking good so we need to save this again in a different format so go to file save as i'm just going to save mine to my downloads folder but as we're choosing our format for this file you'll want to choose the csv ms-dos version of the csv so let's save it so now let's hop back into google analytics so we can import this information into our admin section when you're in google analytics no matter what page you're currently on to find the data import section that i was in in the beginning of this video go to admin and then it's going to be the last option under your middle property column we see data import so you can see this account has already uploaded their bing or microsoft ads information into the account we do have another video on that but the process i'm going through right now is pretty much the exact same but if you want to see some of the other columns that you can add for your microsoft ads account then you can check out that video too but let's get back to uploading our facebook costs so in this case we want to create a new data import and in this case we want to upload our cost data hit continue now we can name our data set and then you have to select which views within google analytics you want to apply this data set once that's complete we can click continue and now we're back to the data set schema step that we first looked at in the beginning of this video so again those are the three mandatory columns and look at the id formatting that's exactly why we had to change our column headers but now we have to add the additional columns that we have added to our excel file so in the second section i have added all three of these metrics into my report and then the only additional one that we're missing is going to be our campaign header for import behavior you can leave it as the default and let's click save everything looks good so let's click done i'm going to head back to the data import and there's a link right above the refresh button so now we see the initial data set for our facebook cost data there it is q1 2020 but now we need to add our file to this data set so let's go to manage uploads and let's upload our file and there's the file that i created if we click upload right now the file is validating if i hit refresh we can see that is completed with a green check mark if there's anything wrong with your excel file remember what i said even just one capitalization is off in your headers if one date in one cell is formatted improperly the entire thing is going to get rejected and you'll see a red x letting you know that you have to try again for whatever reason if you need to change the file that's associated with this data set you can always click on that specific file and then you do have the option to delete it and then you'd have to go back and just upload another file now that our cost data from facebook is uploaded into google analytics we want to see that data right of course we do now it may take a little bit for that data to show up within google analytics and out of all the times i've done this throughout the years i've only seen it take longer than 24 hours once for the most part almost every single time i've been able to pretty much go and look at that cost information immediately so to view the cost information let's go over to the acquisition section click on campaigns and there you will see a cost analysis if we click on that one i can now see the impressions clicks and of course the cost in that exact date range that i exported from facebook and have now imported into google analytics so now you have that report saved within the facebook business manager so every time you log into your ads account you can update the date range easily export the metrics that are important to you into an excel sheet do some simple formatting and understand it'll just take a minute to upload into google analytics thanks for watching 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