Facebook Ads report templates: what each one answers

Pick the template by the question

All six are Data Studio reports (Google’s reporting tool, renamed from Looker Studio; the vendors’ pages still use the older name). Catchr and Coupler.io say their templates read your Facebook Ads data through their own connector; the Porter Metrics pages say the templates work with Data Studio and do not describe the setup. The Coupler.io templates are also described on Coupler.io’s own roundup.

Start with Meta’s own reports

Ads Manager has report templates of its own. Meta’s Help Center says some of them analyse engagement, commonly used performance metrics, an ROI snapshot, and reach and frequency, and that you can edit, add or delete metrics and breakdowns, then export the report or save it. It sits inside Ads Manager and needs no connector. The templates above are for a report that has to live in Data Studio.

Read the page, not the title

Two of these templates do less than their names suggest.

• The Porter Metrics attribution template is titled as an attribution report, but its page does not describe attribution models, conversion paths or attribution windows. It lists standard Facebook Ads metrics with breakdowns. Treat it as a performance report with conversions and ROAS in it.
• The Porter Metrics creative template lists impressions, clicks, spend, CTR and CPC for each ad. It does not list engagement rate, conversion rate or frequency, so it ranks creatives by clicks and cost, not by what they led to.

What each one needs to run

The template is free to copy. The cost sits with the vendor and its plans.

• Catchr offers a 14-day free trial, with no credit card required, and calls the template free.
• Porter Metrics gives 14 days of full access, then a free plan. Its template pages do not say which plan a template needs, so check its pricing page.
• Coupler.io asks you to create an account and says no credit card is needed. Its pricing page lists a free plan with one account, one source, manual refresh and 100 rows per run, and does not say which plan the Facebook Ads templates need.

A free template on a plan that only refreshes by hand is a report that goes stale, so look at the refresh limits before you promise a weekly report.

What no Meta-only template can tell you

Every template above reports what Meta says happened. Your manager asks what happened in the store. This is the same year for six platforms in the [Demo] E-commerce store: spend and each platform’s own conversion count from the ad data, and completed store orders whose session came from that platform (medium = cpc).

Some platforms report fractional conversions, so cost per platform conversion is computed on the unrounded counts. Twitter is left out because it reports no conversions; the store recorded 14 orders from it. Between the six platforms above the platforms report 3,205 conversions against 1,929 store orders, 66% more. And the ranking changes with the count. By cost per platform-reported conversion, TikTok ($47.67) is cheaper than Facebook ($49.30). By cost per store order, Facebook ($82.44) is cheaper than TikTok ($90.48). A Facebook Ads template can show the first number. It cannot show the second, because the orders are not in Meta’s data.

A rule that follows: when two platforms swap places depending on whose count you use, hold the budget decision until you have the store’s number. Use the platform’s numbers for work inside the platform, such as comparing creatives, because they are the only numbers that exist at ad level, and store orders for budget. Store orders here are attributed by the source of the order’s own session, a deliberately simple rule. An order from a customer who clicked an ad last week and came back direct is not counted for the platform, so neither count is the truth, and both belong in the report.

This is the query behind the table. Hand it to whoever owns your warehouse: it reads the demo store’s views, so they swap in your own ad spend, sessions and orders tables.

WITH ad AS (
  SELECT source, SUM(spend) AS spend, SUM(platform_conversions) AS platform_conversions
  FROM `owox-demo.ecommerce.ad_performance`
  WHERE date BETWEEN '2025-01-01' AND '2025-12-31' AND medium = 'cpc'
  GROUP BY source
),
st AS (
  SELECT s.source, COUNT(DISTINCT o.order_id) AS store_orders
  FROM `owox-demo.ecommerce.orders` AS o
  JOIN `owox-demo.ecommerce.sessions` AS s ON s.session_id = o.session_id
  WHERE o.order_date BETWEEN '2025-01-01' AND '2025-12-31'
    AND o.status = 'Completed' AND s.medium = 'cpc'
  GROUP BY s.source
)
SELECT source, ROUND(spend) AS spend, platform_conversions, store_orders,
       ROUND(spend / platform_conversions, 2) AS cost_per_platform_conversion,
       ROUND(spend / store_orders, 2) AS cost_per_store_order
FROM ad LEFT JOIN st USING (source)
ORDER BY spend DESC

The same gap is covered in AI-ready marketing analytics data, which counts converting sessions (856 for Facebook) where this page counts completed orders (726), so the two Facebook figures differ on purpose. To report cost per order for your own store, load the Facebook Ads data into your warehouse and join it to your orders. OWOX Data Marts has a Facebook Ads connector that collects the data into your warehouse. An analyst defines the join and the metric once, in a Data Mart, and the report in Google Sheets or Data Studio reads that definition.

Templates that no longer match their description

Two things circulate in older lists and no longer match what they are listed as.

• Meta’s Audience Insights. Meta’s Help Center says the tool is no longer available and points to Meta Business Suite Insights for audience data across Facebook and Instagram. The 100-likes threshold often quoted for it appears on a current Meta page as a limit on the city breakdown in Business Suite Insights, which needs 100 Page likes or Instagram followers within your top 45 cities.
• Catchr’s “Ad Spend and Budget” template. I did not find a template with that name on Catchr’s site. The old link opens a generic Meta Ads report from Catchr, which is the one listed above and which does not list remaining budget.

Check a template before you build on it

1. Does the vendor’s page name the metrics you need, in its own words?
2. Which connector does it use, and does the plan you have refresh on the schedule you promised?
3. Which conversion does it report, and does the platform order change when you count store orders instead?
4. Is the date range on the report, with the metric definitions next to the metrics?

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