Facebook Ads Report: A Monthly Meta Ads Report Template (After the 2026 Attribution Changes)
The sections, the Ads Manager clicks, and the paragraph you will need the month a client asks why conversions fell when nothing else did.
A Facebook ads report is the monthly summary of what your Meta campaigns spent, delivered and produced, read against the attribution setting that produced the numbers. You build it in Meta Ads Manager: choose your columns, add breakdowns, save it in Ads Reporting, then export it as .xlsx or .csv or schedule it by email. In 2026 two attribution changes lowered reported conversions in many accounts without any change in performance, so a usable template now states the attribution setting beside every conversion figure.
This covers the sections, how to build and schedule the report in Ads Manager, the 2026 changes with dates from Meta’s own pages, and a footnote you can reuse when a client asks why conversions fell.
What to include in a monthly Facebook ads report
| Section | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| 1. Headline numbers | Amount spent, results, cost per result, purchase value and ROAS if you sell online; this month, last month, same month last year |
| 2. Campaigns | One row per campaign, with its objective in a column |
| 3. Delivery | Reach, impressions, frequency, CPM |
| 4. Creative | Top and bottom ads by spend: link clicks, CTR (link), cost per result |
| 5. Breakdowns | Age, placement, platform or device — only where they changed a decision |
| 6. Attribution | The setting used, and any counting change this month |
| 7. What changed, what we did | Two or three sentences |
Three of these need more than a column list.
Campaigns need their objective beside them. Meta’s Results column counts whatever the ad set was optimizing for, which can be purchases on one row and landing page views on the next. A total of the Results column across objectives adds unlike things. This is the same trap covered in combining Google, Meta and LinkedIn exports.
Rates come from totals. Cost per result is total spend divided by total results for the group, never the average of the cost-per-result column; CPA vs CPL shows how far apart the two get.
Conversions are Meta’s claim. They count what Meta believes its ads caused under the attribution setting, and will not match your store. The structural reasons are in why your conversions do not match Shopify. That is why section 6 exists.
How to build it in Ads Manager
Columns
In Ads Manager, choose Campaigns, Ad sets or Ads, open the Columns dropdown and select Customize columns. Pick your metrics, add the Attribution setting column so every row shows which setting its results are reported under, and tick Save as preset so next month starts from the same columns.
Breakdowns
Select a campaign, ad set or ad, click the Breakdown icon, and choose By time, By delivery or By action. Meta’s help page lists the breakdowns supported for offsite conversions under By delivery: age, gender, age and gender, country, impression device, platform, platform and device, and placement. It also notes that statistical modeling may be used in breakdowns where conversion data is missing or partial, so a breakdown row is not always a direct count.
Save it in Ads Reporting
Ads Reporting is where a report becomes reusable. Open it from Analyze and report in the main menu, or choose Create custom report from the menu in Ads Manager. Build a custom report or start from a template, choose metrics from the Metrics tab, and save it. Per Meta’s export instructions, the maximum reporting window is 37 months.
Export
In Ads Reporting, tick the checkbox beside a saved report and click Export, or open the report and export from there. Formats are .xlsx and .csv, or a shareable link.
Schedule
Open the report, then either click the link under the report name or the cog icon for report settings, turn on the scheduled email, add the subscriber, and save. Per Meta’s help page, this works for single-account reports only — cross-account reports cannot be scheduled for email — and only people with permissions on the ad account can open the report. For anyone else, export the file and send it.
A Facebook ads report template
PAGE 1 Summary
Amount spent | Results | Cost per result | Purchase value | ROAS
this month / last month / same month last year
What changed (2-3 sentences) | What we did | What's next
PAGE 2 Campaigns objective | spend | results | cost per result | value
PAGE 3 Delivery reach | impressions | frequency | CPM, by month
PAGE 4 Creative top 5 and bottom 5 ads by spend
PAGE 5 Breakdowns only the ones that changed a decision
FOOTNOTE attribution setting, and any counting change this month
A Facebook advertising dashboard and this report are different jobs. Ads Manager is already a dashboard: it answers “how is it going right now”. The monthly report answers “what happened, why, and what are we doing about it”, which is a paragraph and a footnote, not more charts.
The 2026 attribution changes
Two changes this year lowered reported conversions in many accounts without anything changing in the account. A third affects reports that mix in organic Page numbers.
January 12, 2026: 7-day view and 28-day view windows removed from the API
Meta announced on October 16, 2025 that from January 12, 2026 the Ads Insights API would no longer return the 7-day view (7d_view) and 28-day view (28d_view) attribution windows. Meta described this as consistent with Ads Manager; 1-day click, 7-day click, 28-day click, 1-day engaged view and 1-day view remain. The same announcement limited breakdowns of unique-count fields such as reach and hourly breakdowns to 13 months of history, and frequency breakdowns to 6 months. Totals remain available for 37 months.
What it does to a template. If your report is fed by a tool or script that pulled a 7-day or 28-day view window, conversions fall from January with no change in the account. And a year-over-year view of reach by age, or frequency by month, may no longer reach back far enough to fill the comparison column.
March 2026: click-through means a link click, and engage-through is separate
On March 3, 2026 Meta announced that click-through attribution for website and in-store conversions would count only link clicks, with conversions after likes, shares, saves and other non-link interactions moved into a category renamed engage-through. It began rolling out at the end of March for campaigns optimizing for website or in-store conversions, with no change to billing (MediaPost covered it the same day).
Meta’s attribution help page now defines the three standard settings for website and in-store conversions:
- Click-through — events within 1 or 7 days of a link click on the ad.
- View-through — events within 1 day of an impression.
- Engage-through — events within 1 day of a non-link click; for video, a play of 5 seconds, or 97% of a video shorter than 5 seconds.
The same page says some accounts may still use the prior versions while the change rolls out.
What it does to a template. A report that shows only click-through conversions drops, because some of what used to count there now counts as engage-through. If you manage several accounts, they may have switched in different months, so a cross-account comparison can be measuring two definitions at once.
If your report includes organic Page reach
Meta’s February 18, 2026 developer post says a Viewers metric is intended to replace legacy reach for Pages, and that Meta planned to deprecate Post and Page Reach, Video Impressions and Story Impressions in the Graph API in June 2026. This is the Page Insights side, not the Ads Manager columns, but a template that puts organic Page reach next to paid results will find that row changed or empty.
How to explain a drop that is not a drop
- Check the inputs. Amount spent, impressions, CPM and link clicks. If they held steady and conversions fell, the change is in the counting.
- Compare attribution settings. Meta’s help points to its Compare Attribution Settings feature for this, and Customize columns → Comparing Windows shows results under different windows side by side. Show the client the split, not just the total.
- Check your own record. Orders in the store or leads in the CRM for the same period. If those held steady, say so in the first line.
- Mark the break. Annotate the month on every conversion chart, and stop comparing conversion counts across it as if they were the same measure.
The monthly part, in Quiriz
The report is an afternoon the first time and most of a morning every month after. Quiriz for paid media starts from the same export: save each month’s Ads Reporting export into a Google Drive or OneDrive folder, or keep it in a Google Sheet, and connect that folder or sheet once. Quiriz refreshes the dataset on the schedule you set — daily, weekly or monthly. Direct connectors for Google Ads, GA4, Search Console and Meta Ads are coming; HubSpot connects directly today.
An admin writes the definitions once in Company Context — cost per result is amount spent over results, ROAS is purchase value over amount spent, both from summed totals, and which attribution setting the reported conversions use. Every answer in every app uses them.
In PowerPoint, Build a deck with the campaign performance recipe. Quiriz shows the plan first, you edit it, and each chart lands in your template with two to four takeaways written from its own figures; the deck opens with an executive summary, written last from what the slides found and checked against them. The charts are native, editable PowerPoint charts — right-click → Edit Data opens the numbers. In Word, a template with markers such as =QUIRIZ.ASK("amount spent and cost per result by campaign last month", "table") fills in with Resolve markers, charts arrive as native, editable Word charts, and Figure drops a single live number into your own sentence. In Google Slides and Docs the marker is =QUIRIZ("question", "chart").
Next month, Refresh all asks every question again and redraws each object where you left it. If you also run Google, the same build is in the Google Ads report guide.
Where it does not apply
Checking yesterday’s spend is Ads Manager, and nothing beats that. And no tool reading exports can reconcile Meta’s conversion claims with Google’s or with your store: Quiriz reports each platform’s figures as the export states them, side by side, and does not present a blended conversion total as if the overlap had been resolved.
A Meta ads report that refreshes itself
Point Quiriz at your Ads Reporting export, ask for the report in plain English, and bring next month's deck or doc current with Refresh all. Free to start.
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