Hey,

Quick one, and it's worth doing before you close your laptop today.

Three of your Meta reports have been empty since August 6th. And nobody sent you an email about it.

Because on that date, Meta made 3 reporting breakdowns opt-in per ad account: device, hourly by audience time zone, and frequency.

If your account hasn't opted in, those breakdowns return nada.

And that's the part that makes it dangerous.

They don't fail.

There's no error, no warning, no red banner.

It just comes back empty, so the row just quietly stops filling in.

A dashboard reads that as no data. A person reads it as a zero. Both are wrong, and both look completely normal.

And there's no way to backfill the data. So, the longer you wait, the big the data gap will become.

So if you've looked at your device split, your day-part performance, or your frequency distribution in the last four weeks and thought "huh, nothing there," that wasn't your account or one of meta's bugs. Just a setting that changed.

Why this matters more in September than it did in August

Data you didn't collect can't be backfilled.

In November you're going to want to know that mobile is carrying 90% of your conversions, or that frequency on your best-performing audience hit 5 in week two, or that your cheapest hour is 8pm on a Sunday.

Every day the breakdown stays off is a day of Q4 baseline you don't get back.

Each of the three earns its place in the next eleven weeks.

Device tells you whether your Q4 landing page needs to be perfect on mobile or merely fine.

Hourly tells you when to concentrate budget on the two days of the year where hours genuinely matter.

Frequency tells you when your best audience has had enough, which in late November is the difference between a tired winner and a dead one.

The 60-second fix

In Ads Manager: Settings → Create view → Delivery → Additional Breakdowns. Turn them on.

Then do it on every account you own or manage, because it's set per account, not per user.

If you run three brands or have three ad accounts, that's three separate opt-ins.

One exception worth knowing: if your reporting runs through an async report job rather than a live query, the data still comes through. That's why some agencies genuinely haven't noticed anything.

Which brings me to the thing I actually want you to take from this.

Your ad platforms are infrastructure, and infrastructure changes without asking you.

A number that stops arriving looks exactly like a number that's zero, and neither your dashboard nor your agency will necessarily tell them apart.

I wrote up the longer version of why your platforms disagree with each other, and with your bank account, here: https://hologrowth.com/why-ad-platforms-show-different-revenue/​

Go turn the breakdowns back on.

It takes a minute and you'll want that data in eleven weeks.

Talk soon,
Andrej

PS: Reply "breakdowns" and I'll send you the exact click path plus the two other reporting settings I'd check on the same pass.