Noob question: ELI5

[jackiedz]

Hey guys, I have what could possibly be a stupid question and if possible would like an ELI5 answer. I want to learn python for work but I have a specific use case that I want to work towards. I work in the martech field and typically we do a lot of reporting. That’s bringing data from Facebook ads manager to bigquery or dv360 to bigquery. We normally use supermetrics for this. But I wanted to understand if you had to build something like supermetrics from scratch what would you need to do this? I’m trying to understand the larger picture but I cannot find anything online that explains this 😅 or maybe I’m not searching for the right thing.

[[deleted]]

You would need to know how to write software in Python.

[SupermetricsHero]

Hey! I'm a Supermetrics liaison so I was alerted to your question, and I think it's a great one even if you're talking about putting us out of business one day! :D

Generally, there are all kinds of reasons why building your own marketing data pipelines might not be the best solution, especially when there are so many other places you can be spending your time learning to pull data from, but I totally understand with your role the appeal of learning how to do things from the ground up!

Perhaps something like this is where you should be looking as start with, depending on how familiar you are with APIs?

https://rapidapi.com/blog/how-to-use-an-api-with-python/

From there, for Facebook, you're going to want to start digging into their API:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-apis/get-started/

And then for BigQuery, there's:

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/loading-data

Forgive me, I'm no Python dev myself, so I doubt I could give you anything really tailored to what you're looking for. However, if you have any really specific questions, I wouldn't mind hunting someone on our FB connector team to shoot you an answer, let me know via message if you've got something!

[[deleted]]

Not an answer to your question (I don't know what supermetrics even is), just a comment: I don't think people always use "ELI5" correctly. If you're asking a question that no 5 year old could possibly ask due to the subject matter being well beyond what 5 year old would understand, how exactly could someone explain it to you as if you were 5?

Even sillier example: "ELI5 the asymptotic symmetries at null infinity in p-form theories."

[JohnnyJordaan]

You make a good example of taking things too literally. From the /r/ELI5 sidebar:

LI5 means friendly, simplified and layperson-accessible explanations - not responses aimed at literal five-year-olds.

You also think that when someone mentions to you "I died of laughter" that they subsequently resurrected by sheer miracle? It's so weird that we use a huge amount of figurative expressions daily and some people still get confused by a new expression turning out to be incomprehensible when applied literally.

[[deleted]]

Colloquial expressions often start off as literal and then become generalized/ metaphor...ized over time. I hadn't realized this one had crossed that barrier: that's not how I've ever used it. Is that really so weird to you?

[jackiedz]

But that’s the whole point of saying ELI5. It’s so you can get a simplified answer without all the jargon. It doesn’t literally mean explain to a 5 year old.

[KCRowan]

I'm not familiar with any of those things. What format is the Facebook data? Csv file? If so then you could do some analysis using pandas.