Analyze Facebook Ads Data in R via JDBC

Access Facebook Ads data with pure R script and standard SQL on any machine where R and Java can be installed. You can use the CData JDBC Driver for Facebook Ads and the RJDBC package to work with remote Facebook Ads data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to Facebook Ads and visualize Facebook Ads data by calling standard R functions.

Install R

You can match the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running open R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open 3.2.3, which is preconfigured to install packages from the Jan. 1, 2016 snapshot of the CRAN repository. This snapshot ensures reproducibility.

Load the RJDBC Package

To use the driver, download the RJDBC package. After installing the RJDBC package, the following line loads the package:

library(RJDBC)

Connect to Facebook Ads as a JDBC Data Source

You will need the following information to connect to Facebook Ads as a JDBC data source:

• Driver Class: Set this to cdata.jdbc.facebookads.FacebookAdsDriver
• Classpath: Set this to the location of the driver JAR. By default this is the lib subfolder of the installation folder.

The DBI functions, such as dbConnect and dbSendQuery, provide a unified interface for writing data access code in R. Use the following line to initialize a DBI driver that can make JDBC requests to the CData JDBC Driver for Facebook Ads:

driver <- JDBC(driverClass = "cdata.jdbc.facebookads.FacebookAdsDriver", classPath = "MyInstallationDir\lib\cdata.jdbc.facebookads.jar", identifier.quote = "'") 

You can now use DBI functions to connect to Facebook Ads and execute SQL queries. Initialize the JDBC connection with the dbConnect function.

Most tables require user authentication as well as application authentication. Facebook uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate to Facebook, you can use the embedded OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL or you can obtain your own by registering an app with Facebook.

See the Getting Started chapter of the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

Built-in Connection String Designer

For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the Facebook Ads JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

java -jar cdata.jdbc.facebookads.jar

Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

Below is a sample dbConnect call, including a typical JDBC connection string:

conn <- dbConnect(driver,"jdbc:facebookads:InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH;")

Schema Discovery

The driver models Facebook Ads APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:

dbListTables(conn)

Execute SQL Queries

You can use the dbGetQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the Facebook Ads API:

adaccounts <- dbGetQuery(conn,"SELECT AccountId, Name FROM AdAccounts WHERE Name = 'Acct Name'")

You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:

View(adaccounts)

Plot Facebook Ads Data

You can now analyze Facebook Ads data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function:

par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2))
barplot(adaccounts$Name, main="Facebook Ads AdAccounts", names.arg = adaccounts$AccountId, horiz=TRUE)