We have made significant changes to how we sync data from Facebook to Marketing Milk. Previously, we were aiming for maximum correctness. Once a day (or once a week for some types of data), we would sync in the background every single creative, campaign, or what have you to our system for every single business.

This was proving to be massively inefficient and was beginning to starve our compute resources, which was causing problems for other parts of Marketing Milk such as simply trying to publish a campaign.

Even though, theoretically, someone could go into Facebook and make changes to a creative that was made three years ago, it’s not very likely. Therefore, there’s no reason to sync data like this to our system as often as we were.

We are in the process of adopting an “on-demand” syncing system, in which we only sync data on an as-needed basis. For example, that creative from three years ago, we would only sync that to our system if someone specifically tries to view or access it through Marketing Milk Ad Builder.

Please note that this does not mean changes made in Facebook will instantaneously show up in Marketing Milk. The best way to ensure that Marketing Milk is 100% up to date at all times is to create and update your campaigns, creatives, etc. in Marketing Milk Ad Builder.

Ad Builder Campaigns Table

Video: https://www.loom.com/share/d48a22f4057e469586b51eeb5ddd5cea

The campaigns table in Ad Builder now uses infinite scroll and the searchbar has been updated to be more intelligent. Previously, it only searched through already-loaded campaigns. It now sends a request to the backend and searches through all possible campaigns.

It's also now possible to edit existing campaigns directly in Marketing Milk. A common use case is to extend the end date of a campaign and add more budget. Please note that some parameters, such as the campaign optimization and the start date, cannot be changed after the fact.

In addition, you can also pause and unpause campaigns, adsets, and ads. If you are used to doing this in Facebook, it should work exactly the same way in Marketing Milk. In the example below, all of the ads are running, but because the adset they belong to has been pause, then they are effectively paused as well.

Google Analytics View IDs

Data Uploader Changes

A check has been added to the data uploader to ensure a business has a configured offline event set. If it doesn’t, the data uploader will be disabled and will prompt you to configure an offline event set in the Admin area before allowing you to proceed.

In addition, the data uploader now accepts uploads with a new column… order_id. Please refer to Facebook documentation for why you might want to include this column in your uploads.

                          

The Upload Status table now has two new columns: Daily Avg. Events and Daily Avg. Revenue.

Multiple updates to the overview section of data uploads have been made.

• Total Uploaded = The total number of events included in your original upload to Marketing Milk
• Facebook Accepted = The total number of events that Facebook accepted after processing your upload. Facebook recently introduced a deduplication process and sometimes erroneously removes events when it shouldn’t. We have a support ticket in with Facebook to try to better understand what is going on here.
• Facebook Matched = The total number of events that Facebook was able to match to a Facebook profile. Match rate is equal to Facebook Matched / Facebook Accepted.
• Other Customers = The number of customers Marketing Milk removed from your upload due to low quality data. If an event is lacking any discernable identifying customer information (name, phone, email, etc.) then we do not bother sending it to Facebook.
• Attributed Customers = The number of customers that Facebook says they served one of our ads to, therefore we can be confident that we were responsible for driving that purchase.

Data Normalization (Data Uploader and Cyclr Bridges)

Previously, in order to include a "st" column in your data upload for US state, it needed to be the two-letter state abbreviation and it needed to be lowercase (e.g. "ut")

We now accept a wider range of formats. The following examples are all now acceptable, and we normalize them to the two-letter version seen above.

ut, UT, Utah, utah

Performance Improvements for the Upload Submissions table

In recent weeks, the Upload Submissions page has slowed to a crawl and sometime doesn’t even load. This was due to scaling issues and accumulating more data in the system. This page has been optimized and should now be reasonably performant.

Audiences in the Adset Metrics Table

The audience map on the Adsets tab of the metrics table received a bugfix. Previously, it only showed pindrops. Now, it will show state and country outlines if you originally targeted those regions with your audience.

Bad Data Submissions

Added a column for the business name to the Bad Data Submissions table. For supervisors responsible for reviewing and approving these bad data requests, this should help them decide what to prioritize.

Goal Reports emails

This one goes out to Stephen Curitore and Logan Roberts. Your Goal Reports email has been brought back.

Roll Thru emails

We are now sending out a weekly email to every AM that gives a high level stats for each of your businesses. The attached CSV contains data for every actively running campaign, adset, and ad and how much ad spend is occurring. In addition, you can see any Facebook errors that might be preventing any of these things from working correctly. If there are errors, it's recommended to find the relevant campaign in Marketing Milk Ad Builder and click on "Retry Campaign".

            

Ad Builder UI Improvements

We've cleaned up “empty” pages across Ad Builder. Some pages, such as the View Creatives page, were simply blank when a business didn't have any creatives made yet which could be a bit confusing. We improved the UI like this in several places.

Login Bugfix

Fixed a bug affecting a small amount of users that was causing an infinite loop on the login page and causing the browser tab to crash.

Upload Approved/Rejected Emails

A user reported that the “View Upload” button in the upload approved/rejected email contained a broken link. This has since been fixed and the button takes you to the correct upload in the client dashboard. In addition, the business name has been added to the email so that you have more context.

Ad Builder Video Uploads

Fixed a bug that was preventing larger file size videos from being uploaded through Ad Builder when making creatives.

Video: https://www.loom.com/share/c62c5bb29ba4419a835e6aa99b4e15ee

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