your meta ads, in the interview

the short version

you can now connect your meta ad account to underway, read-only. what your facebook and instagram ads did each day becomes one line in the tray: what each campaign spent, how many people it reached, the leads and sign-ups it brought in, and what each one cost.

an ad meta rejects becomes a line too, with meta's reason. the first lead from an ad is a milestone. and like everything the app collects, all of it arrives unticked, for you to tick when the episode is about it.

it is on every plan. it is in review with meta for now, so it opens to a small test group first. more on that below.

why ads belong in the diary

the week you start paying for attention is one of the biggest weeks a small business has. money is going out every hour. you are refreshing the ads manager between everything else. the first lead comes in at eleven at night. one ad gets rejected for a reason you have to read three times.

rich, who builds underway, said it on 4 october when underway's own ads went live: we started the ads, they're performing, we've got leads, we've had a failure. that is an episode. it is exactly the kind of day the interview should know about without being told.

and it is exactly the kind of day nobody writes down. by the time you sit down to film, the morning's numbers are a blur and the rejection is a vague annoyance. connected, the interview can ask the real question: six leads at four pounds each yesterday, what changed? or: meta turned down the launch ad, what did it say, and what are you doing about it?

what a line looks like

one line per ad account per day the ads ran, dated, naming the three campaigns that spent most and counting the rest:

• your meta ads on sat 3 oct: 'founders us' spent £24, reached 812 people, 6 leads at £4 each; 'retargeting' spent £8, reached 140 people, no leads yet.
• your meta ads so far today (sun 4 oct): 'founders us' spent £11, reached 390 people, 2 leads at £5.50 each.
• meta rejected your ad 'launch film': ads may not make claims about income.

today's line is rewritten while the day's numbers settle, and only when its words change, so a quiet hour adds nothing. yesterday's line is the settled one. a day with no spend and nothing back writes no line at all, because an empty line every day is noise.

the lines land on the numbers tab of the tray, next to payments, sign-ups and traffic. each one is also written to your day log, so months later you can ask the archive when the ads first brought in a lead, and it answers with the date.

milestones and targets

leads and sign-ups from ads are added up from the day you connect. the first lead from an ad is a milestone, then ten, a hundred and a thousand, and the same for sign-ups. like every milestone, the first reading is a baseline: connect a month into a campaign and you are not told about the first lead as if it just happened.

under nudges you can set your own target against either, leads from meta ads or sign-ups from meta ads, and a season can have one as its goal.

connecting it

account, connections, what your tools saw. connect meta ads signs you in with facebook and asks for one permission: to read your ad accounts' results. if you run more than one ad account, the card lists them under which ad accounts count, with every running one ticked until you choose.

meta's sign-in lasts sixty days and meta does not let an app renew it without you. a week before it runs out the card says so and shows reconnect meta ads. the phone shows the same line under connections.

in review, and the test group

meta reviews every app that reads ad accounts before it opens to everyone, and that review takes weeks. until it clears, only people meta lets us add as testers can connect. so for now the card is greyed and marked in review, with email to join the test group. send that email and you can connect today. a founder already connected keeps working as normal.

what it will never do

• change an ad. it cannot create, pause, edit or pay for anything. it reads.
• read who clicked. no names, no audiences, no people. totals per campaign only.
• mix with your episodes. these are your business's numbers, like a payment from stripe. your episodes' views are a different thing, shown to you and never to the director.
• steer the story. a line is context the interview can ask about if you tick it. it is never a hook the cut is built around.

connect it once and the day your ads land is a day the interview knows about. see every connection.