Motion makes a lot of requests to Facebook's API to pull detailed data for your reports. While we carefully built the app to optimize against reaching API limits, on occasion the way that you've setup Motion or use your accounts may result in the limit being reached and a one hour time out from the Motion. Read below to learn more about why this happens and what you can do to avoid it.

Facebook does not report what causes individual accounts to hit the API limits, however we do know that it will occurs for one of two reasons:

Based on our internal data, the former case is the only one which has occurred on Motion so far - and fortunately can be avoided with a bit of troubleshooting.

A few quick changes to your Motion accounts can help you avoid hitting API limits in essentially all circumstances. Read through the rest of this guide to see what changes you can make to your account now to avoid this error in the future.

We force different Motion users connect Motion to their personal Facebook accounts before accessing reports to spread the number of API calls made among multiple users. When a user shares a single Motion account among multiple people, it leads to more requests being made and (even worse) concurrent requests being made at once (eg. two people loading different reports at the same time). This can cause Facebook to block requests from that account for a certain period of time.

Rather than sharing a single account, you should navigate to your Organization settings and create a new account for every single team member on Motion.

When a user connects a Facebook Ad Account to a Motion Workspace for the first time, that user becomes the syncing user for that account. What this means is that all background syncing processes (run hourly on Motion to check if new ads were created or updated) will occur on that users Facebook account.

This is not usually too tasking on the API, however if one user has connected an overwhelming number of Facebook Ad Accounts it can overwhelm that users API token and cause API limits to be reached.

As a rough rule of thumb, we typically recommend a single user connects no more than 15 ad accounts to Motion through their Facebook user. If more are desired, we suggest that another Motion user uses their Facebook user for the next 15, and so on and so forth. If you believe this is contributing to you reaching limits, please reach out to our support team and we can change the syncing users in your organization through our backend.

Other apps such as Supermetrics also contribute to Facebook API limits. If you have the one personal Facebook account connected to multiple ad accounts on both Motion and an app like Supermetrics, the syncing demands from Supermetrics will contribute to your risk of hitting API limits on Motion.

Similar to the previous subheading, we suggest that you avoid using just one Facebook profile to connect to multiple apps. Instead, leveraging multiple Facebook accounts spreads the API load across multiple users and mitigates the risk of you hitting your limits.