Why is the data shown in Creative Report different

🤔“Creative Report” and “Ad Report” display two different data sets.

Technical reason: Ad Report and Creative Report data are obtained through separate APIs.

Ad Report data is for financial purposes indicating how much money has been spent and it can directly affect the financial settlement of the media.

Creative Report data is obtained via Facebook or Google’s creative report API by XMP indicating the rough cost distribution of creatives within an Ad. Therefore, the total cost of all creatives under the same ad may not equal the cost of the Ad itself. The same applies to other data metrics.

For example:

Typically, in terms of Facebook’s dynamic creatives or AAA campaigns, there are multiple creatives included under an Ad.

What’s more, since two different APIs are used for media data feedback, two sets of data will be obtained:

1. Ad Report: it can show data about an Ad, such as if an Ad spends $1000, then the Ad Report will display a spend of $1000.
2. Creative Report: it can show the spend for each material. However, in actual practice, even if an Ad spends $1000, the total spend for all materials under that Ad often does not always equal $1000.

Other Possible Reasons:

According to consultations with the Google and Facebook technical teams, data discrepancies may be caused by the following reasons:

1. For programmatic creatives, dynamic creatives, multiple creatives within one ad, and cases where images and videos are displayed simultaneously, Facebook or Google sometimes attributes certain impression costs to multiple creatives, leading to the total cost of creatives being higher than the cost of the Ad.
2. For Google’s UAC Ads, the system sometimes displays ads on some text ad spaces in the Google Play store, and this cost will not be included in the data post-backed by the Creative Report API, resulting in less total data in Creative Report compared to Ad Report.

Recommendations：

1. Due to the inevitable differences in their data, Creative Report is more suitable for horizontal comparison of creatives rather than direct comparison with Ad data. Therefore, it is recommended to compare different creatives’ CTR, CPC, cost, and ROI to identify and choose those creatives with higher performance for further advertising.
2. With the processing time required by XMP for the Creative Report data, there may be a delay of up to 6-8 hours between the daily Creative Name Report and the Ad Report. Therefore, please take the delay into account when you choose different reports for analysis. In terms of timeliness and accuracy, Ad Report > Creative ID Report > Creative Name Report.
3. While XMP will try to ensure consistency between Ad Report and Creative Report, it is still recommended to exclude data from the current day before analyzing Creative Report data.

Appendix:
Asset reporting doesn’t include auto-generated assets, which could contain additional metrics. As a result, you shouldn’t expect the sum of all asset spending to be consistent with your overall campaign spend.

Google: Introduction to asset reporting for App campaigns