Read the ads report

Ads is a tab on Reports. It answers one question: of the people who tapped one of your ads and then messaged you on WhatsApp, what happened next. On screen it introduces itself as What each ad produced in conversations, contacts and revenue. It only reads. Nothing here changes a contact, a conversation or a payment.

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Open the report

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What DMLY sees, and what it cannot

To work out whether an ad paid for itself you need both halves: take the revenue on this page and set it against the spend in Ads Manager yourself. DMLY never sees your ad account, so it can never do that sum for you.

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What each number means

The cards sum up the whole window. The table breaks the same figures down per ad. Rows are ordered busiest first: most conversations, and where two ads tie, most messages.

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Who gets credit for a contact

A contact belongs to exactly one ad: the first one that ever brought them to you. That is first-touch credit, and it never moves afterwards. This matters most for the ads you run at people who already know you. Say a salon runs a Summer Sale ad in June that brings in forty new clients, then a Winter Clearance ad in December aimed at reminding old clients you exist. Fifteen of those June clients tap the December ad and message you. If it worked the other way round, every re-engagement ad you ever ran would look like your best source of new business, and the ad that actually paid to win those clients would show nothing. So a re-engagement ad is credited honestly: it gets the conversations it caused, and it does not claim customers it merely reached again. The same rule writes the Source on the contact record itself, in words rather than IDs: WhatsApp ad: Summer Sale, or WhatsApp post: Our new opening hours when the tap came from an organic post rather than a paid ad. A later ad never overwrites it, and neither does anything overwrite a source you typed in yourself, so a contact you had already marked as Walk-in referral keeps that. You can filter and segment on Source; see Tags and segments.

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Revenue

Revenue against an ad is money you collected inside your date range, from the contacts that ad acquired. It puts the same value on a payment as the finance report does for Money in, deliberately, so the two can never price the same sale differently:

• Dated by the day the payment arrived, not by the day the ad ran and not by the day you invoiced.
• Tips are excluded. A gratuity moves money but is not takings.
• Refunds are taken off.
• A payment that never actually arrived does not count.
• Amounts are added up in your workspace currency, with no conversion between currencies.

One kind of payment lands here that Money in deliberately leaves out: a gift card being spent. The finance report drops those, because it already counted that money when you sold the card; this column does not. So an ad-won customer paying with a gift card adds to their ad’s revenue without adding to Money in. Either way these rows are a slice of your takings rather than all of them, and they are not meant to add up to Money in. Because it is dated by the payment, an ad from six months ago can show revenue this month, as long as somebody also tapped that ad inside your window. If nobody did, the ad has no row at all and that money appears nowhere on this page.

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Who can see the money

The Ads tab itself is not restricted to people who can see finance. Anyone who can open Reports gets it.

• Can view finance (owners and admins, and any role you have given that permission): the full report, with the Revenue card, the Revenue column and revenue in the export.
• Cannot view finance: the same report with the money taken out. Three cards instead of four, no Revenue column, and no revenue in the CSV. Everything else works normally: conversations, messages, new contacts, the dates and the export are all there.

The money is not merely hidden from the screen for that teammate. It is removed before the page is built, so it is not sitting behind the table waiting to be found. See Roles and permissions. Exporting is a separate permission again: CSV needs Export reports, which is admin only by default. The button is shown to everyone, so a teammate can select it and still be turned away. That is true of every Reports tab.

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Filter by date

From and To are the only filters, and there is nothing to select to apply them: the report reloads the moment you change a date. A Clear filter link appears while either is set and resets both.

• Leave both blank and you get the trailing 30 days, ending today.
• Set From later than To and DMLY reads it as a typo and swaps them, rather than showing you nothing.

What your dates govern: With nothing to show, the table reads No ad-referred conversations in this range. On a very busy range a warning appears above the table: Showing the first 20,000 ad messages in this range. Narrow the dates for exact figures. Split the range into shorter windows when you need the counts to be exact.

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Export

Your From and To carry into the CSV, so the file matches the window you were looking at. See Exporting reports.

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Where else an ad shows up

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Caveats

An ad I am running is not in the list

Nobody has tapped it and messaged you inside your dates. DMLY learns about an ad from the message it produces, so an ad with no messages is invisible here rather than a row of zeros. Widen the dates, then check the ad in Ads Manager to see whether it is getting clicks at all.

New contacts does not change when I narrow the dates

Correct, and deliberate. The dates decide which ads are listed, and how many conversations and messages they had. New contacts is the total that ad has ever acquired, so it stays put. To ask “how many new people did this ad bring me in March”, set the dates to March and read Conversations, then check the contacts themselves by Source.

A regular customer answered my ad and it shows no new contact

That is the report working. They were already yours, so the ad gets the Conversations it earned while the credit for winning them stays with the ad that first brought them in. Anything they spend stays with that first ad too.

The revenue here does not match Meta's numbers

The two are not measuring the same thing. This column is money you actually collected in DMLY from the people an ad brought you: after refunds, without tips, and with nothing subtracted for ad spend. Meta reports on what it observed on its own platform. Expect them to differ, and use Ads Manager for cost.

The Revenue column is missing for one of my team

Their role cannot view finance. They still get the rest of the report. Give them View finance (invoices, payments, orders) if they should see the money. See Roles and permissions.

Two rows look like the same ad

Check the IDs under the headlines. Two different ads sharing a headline get a row each, which is right: they are two ads. One ad never splits across two rows, however often you rename it.

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