Ad spend and profit in one table
5 min read
The ad account holds the spend, the CPA account holds the revenue, and the place that adds the two together is usually the media buyer's notebook. The Finance section takes that notebook's place.
The gap between two screens
Facebook Ads Manager tells you how much money you spent. The CPA network account tells you how many orders were confirmed. Neither of them sees the other.
The most important question is left unanswered as a result: is this campaign making a profit? To work that out you have to line up two tables by hand, convert the currency and tie the leads to the campaign — every day.
The Finance section does that work itself. Which ad the lead came from is already known, the order status comes back from the CPA network, and the spend is pulled from Facebook.
What sits on one screen
The cards at the top give the total for the whole selected period:
- Leads and Delivered — how many leads came in and how many reached the destination
- Delivery rate — the ratio between them, as a per cent
- Spend — the Facebook spend, converted into soum
- Revenue and Hold — confirmed and still pending CPA payouts
- CPL — the price of one lead
- Profit, Projected profit and ROAS
“Projected profit” needs a note of its own. Hold is the orders that have not been delivered yet but get paid once they are. Not all of them arrive, so the system multiplies the hold by your delivery rate over the last 30 days and only then adds it to revenue. So this is not optimism but an estimate built on your own history.
From campaign down to ad
The bottom-line number does not answer the question — it only raises one. So the table is split into three levels: campaign, ad set and the individual ad. Select a campaign and its ad sets open up; select an ad set and its ads do.
Each row takes a colour from the thresholds you set: “Expensive”, “Near threshold”, “Loss zone”. You set those thresholds yourself — in dollars for CPL, as a multiple for ROAS. A new campaign is marked “New — too early to judge”, which holds off a hasty conclusion.
It is not a zero that gets shown but a specific line: next to the row sits the break-even point for that campaign — once CPL goes above that number, the campaign does not pay for itself.
Soum, dollar and the rate
Facebook shows the spend in dollars while the CPA networks pay in soum. To compare them, both have to be brought to one currency.
By default each day of spend is counted at the Central Bank rate for that same day — not the average rate for the month, but that day. If you buy dollars at a different rate, you enter it by hand in the settings and the calculation follows that number.
The message arrives even when you are not watching the screen
There is no need to open the panel every day. Two alerts come through Telegram on their own.
The CPL alert: a message arrives when the cost per lead goes above the threshold you set. The daily report arrives as a single message every evening at 23:00, and it has two sections — the campaigns that made a loss over the recent settled days and the ones that turned a profit.
Both come inside one message, so the phone gets one notification every evening rather than two.
The limits of these numbers
The section does not hide its limits, because a hidden limit leads to a wrong decision.
Not every destination can report back that a lead was lost — when such destinations are in use, the “Lost” column is incomplete, and the table says so itself. Beyond that, results that could not be tied to any ad are shown separately: they are not in the rows, but they are not hidden either.
One more difference: the “Leads” card at the top counts the leads that came in, while the platform table counts deliveries. When one lead goes to several destinations the second number is larger — that is not an error but two different answers to two different questions.
Spend data refreshes from Facebook every six hours, so today's spend is not a live counter. The currency of some ad accounts is not supported yet, and in that case a warning appears saying the spend is incomplete.
The orders list
The “Orders” section next to it lists the orders that came back from the CPA networks: order ID, campaign, status, payout and date.
The statuses are the ones the network gave: pending, accepted, delivered, cancelled, archived. The payout column holds either an exact amount, or “Paid on delivery” — that is, a hold — or “Not sold — no payout”.
That list is the source of the Revenue and Hold numbers in the Finance section. When the bottom-line number raises a doubt, it can be checked there row by row.