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event column is always NULL in facebook_ads.ad_conversion table

Answered
Zeynep Dinç User

Which destination?: facebook_ads

Additional details: We are the engineering team at Udemy (udemy.com). 

We're using the Fivetran Facebook Ads connector and we noticed that the event column in the ad_conversion table is consistently returning NULL values.

We can confirm that conversion events are actively being received on the Facebook side — our Facebook Pixel (ID: 1457291081167286) is receiving events such as PageView, isMember, and Purchase with significant volume (e.g. 150M+ PageViews, 982K Purchases in the last ~30 days).

Expected behavior: The event column should reflect the conversion event name (e.g. Purchase, PageView, etc.)

Actual behavior: The event column is always NULL

Could you clarify:

  1. Is the event column populated from the Facebook Ads API, or from the Pixel/Conversions API separately?
  2. Is there a known issue or a specific API endpoint/field that maps to this column?
  3. Do we need any additional permissions or API scopes enabled on our Facebook connection to populate this field?

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Comments

1 comment

Date Votes
  • Official comment
    Lucas Alexander Fivetranner

    Hi Zeynep,

    Thanks for flagging this and for the detailed investigation on your end. I believe what you're seeing with the event column is expected behavior, not a bug. I think the data you actually need is already accessible via the connector.

    The event column in the ad_conversion table is sourced from Meta's conversion_specs field on the Ad object. This field is derived from the ad set's optimization_goal (source). Within conversion_specs, the event sub-field specifically holds a Facebook Event ID, and it is only populated when action.type is rsvp (i.e., ads promoting RSVPs to a Facebook Event) (source). For standard Pixel-based campaigns like yours (Purchase, PageView, etc.), action.type will be something like offsite_conversion, which populates the fb_pixel/dataset/offsite_pixel columns instead. event is null because no Facebook Event RSVP tracking is configured on these ads.

    The good news: the named Pixel conversion event data you're looking for (Purchase, PageView, etc.) is already available through the Fivetran Facebook Ads connector, just not in ad_conversion. It's synced via the Ads Insights actions field with action_type breakdown, which you can pull into a table using a custom report in your connector configuration. You can also use the prebuilt basic_ad_actions table. That will give you one row per action type per ad, with the actual event name (e.g., omni_purchase, landing_page_view) rather than a Facebook Event ID.

    You can find more on configuring custom reports here: https://fivetran.com/docs/connectors/applications/facebook-ads.

    Let me know if I missed something or if you have follow-up questions.

    Cheers,
    Luke