Motion provides a simple platform for you to aggregate, visualize, and share your data. Up until the present, the important story that our users have been telling is one of the success of their creatives within Facebook. However, as web privacy advances and limits Facebook’s ability to attribute data, it’s increasingly important for our users to have their best data to drive this story.

That’s why we couldn’t be more excited to announce our official Google Analytics and Motion integration. Google Analytics provides a simple and easy way for you to cross-reference your Facebook results against your Google Analytics data on any Top Performing Ads report.

About the Integration

The Google Analytics integration allows you to add up to six Google Analytics-specific columns to your Motion reports:

  • Purchase Value

  • Purchases

  • CPA

  • ROAS

  • Conversion rate

  • Sessions

Once connected, you’ll be able to view these Google columns in tandem against your Facebook results, to quickly compare between the two and select results from your chosen source of truth.

How Google Analytics works on Motion

Motion accurately matches your Google Analytics results to your Facebook results by matching UTM data in Google Analytics to Facebook ads on any Top Performing Ads report. This is best setup on your end by properly leveraging Facebook's URL dynamic parameters.

Setting up the Google Analytics integration

Setting up the Google Analytics integration is super easy with Motion. To get started, you'll need to visit Account Settings while on any account on the Motion interface:

Next, hit the "Connect Google Analytics Account" under the Google Analytics tab, and follow the dialog prompts.

Selecting the right view

We recommend that users connect the View that they most commonly use to review and report on Google Analytics result. This is because we will automatically pull data with the same filtering and properties that you have set on Google Analytics - so your Motion results will accurately reflect any blacklisting that you have setup on Google Analytics.

Viewing results

Once Google Analytics is setup in the Account Settings page on Motion, you'll be able to view results on any corresponding Top Performing Ads report. To add one of the six available Google KPIs, simply navigate to the KPI selection tool on any report and add the Google metrics you are most interested in reviewing.

Ideal configuration for the most accurate matching

We leverage the most common UTM structure used on Facebook Ads Library to deliver ad matching to Google Analytics.

This employs Facebook's dynamic parameters to automatically send the correct UTM tags everytime an audience clicks on an ad. By default, Motion will read the UTM_content, UTM_term, and UTM_campaign tags looking for matching parameters (those parameters being ID or Names). These dynamic parameters must be correctly setup on your end so that your ads are sending the correct data to Facebook.

There are a few ways you can set up dynamic parameters to properly match Google Analytics data on Motion.

The best method for UTM matching

The ideal way to setup your UTM tags is to match the Ad ID to one of the three fields read by Motion (UTM_campaign, UTM_term, or UTM_content).

Since Ad ID is totally unique, so long as you include it in one of these three dynamic parameters, we'll be able to accurately match your Google Analytics results to Facebook in almost all instances.

A less preferred method

Sometimes, marketers may not want to include Ad ID in their UTM data because it can be hard to read on the Google Analytics interface versus just writing in the ad name.

In these instances, we can still match data so long as {{campaign.name}}, {{adset.name}}, and {{ad.name}} are all included within the UTM_content, UTM_term, and UTM_campaign tags.

Its important to note that both Motion and Facebook discourage this strategy because naming UTMs of names is fundamentally unreliable, for two reasons:

  • If you change your ad name, Facebook will not update its dynamic name parameters. As a result, your Google Analytics data will not accurately reflect your Facebook data.

  • Sometimes, you may give two ads the same name. If this occurs, Google Analytics will combine data across these multiple ads.

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