Guide to Exporting Facebook Ads Data

Each ad you run on Facebook generates many insights. On a small scale, in a team of one ideally, these are fine to directly analyze on the platform. However, things get trickier when you actually need to report on the performance to your team or other stakeholders. In such situations, the ability to export Facebook Ads data comes in handy.

Facebook offers built-in exporting capability available for a few common formats. With little to no effort, you can also set up automatic data exports into the tool of your choice. Learn how to go about this in our useful guide.

Why export Facebook Ads?

Exporting Facebook Ads data opens up opportunities for much deeper analysis. The most basic thing is to pull the data into your favorite spreadsheet tool, be it Excel, Google Sheets, or any other. With little effort, you’ll be able to see trends, evaluate the profitability of different approaches, and see what works best for your business.

Facebook ads data can easily be synced with Facebook Ads reporting tools or data visualization tools, such as Tableau, Power BI, or Data Studio. With either of them, you can build beautiful, customizable dashboards, and share them with your teammates and stakeholders. Check out some of the best Looker Studio Facebook Ads templates that we collected for you.

Also, exporting data from Facebook makes sense for the sole purpose of combining it with other data at your disposal. It could be advertising data from other channels, website analytics, user data, or virtually anything else that will enhance your Facebook data. 

How do you export Facebook Ads campaigns?

Exporting data from your campaigns is a very common use case. It gives you the list of all ongoing, scheduled, and finished campaigns, their budget, settings, or the set objectives.

• To export campaigns automatically, first, create a Coupler.io account. Then, press the Add new importer button and choose the source and destination apps. You can export Facebook Ads to Google Sheets, Excel, BigQuery, as well as Looker Studio, and Power BI. For demonstration purposes, we’ll choose to export Facebook ads data to Google Sheets.

Step 1. Extract data from Facebook Ads

• At this point, you may also name the importer. As the next step, add the Facebook account with access to your Facebook Ads Manager. You’ll be taken to Facebook to sign in and authorize Coupler.io to export the data on your behalf.
• Next, decide which Data entity you want to export: Reports and insights, List of Ad sets, List of Campaigns, List of Ads, List of Ad accounts. In this case, the List of Campaigns makes the most sense. 
• Select one or more Ad accounts to pull the data from. All accounts available to the selected user will appear on the dropdown list.

Note: If you choose the Reports and insights data entity for export, you’ll need to specify the report period – start and end dates for your data. Optionally, you can change the breakdown period for your analytics. And select columns you want to include in the report. 

Step 2. Transform data from Facebook Ads before loading it to the destination

Before actually exporting your Facebook Ads data, you can preview it and even apply some transformations:

• Sort and filter data based on the selected criteria and specified value.
• Manage columns (hide, rename, reorder, change data type).
• Add new columns using supported calculation formulas.

Step 3. Manage data to load to the destination

Now onto the destination settings. For demonstration purposes, we’ve chosen to export Facebook ads data to Google Sheets. You can also export Facebook Ads to Excel or Facebook Ads data to BigQuery if you’d like.

Connect your Google account and again authorize Coupler.io to access your files. Then, choose the spreadsheet and sheet to import the data to. You can create a new sheet by typing a new sheet name.

Finally, toggle on the Automatic data refresh feature and decide on the schedule that will govern the data refresh. You can have your data updated as frequently as every 15 minutes.

When you’re finished, press the Save and run button to launch the importer. Once the import is finalized, click the View results button to jump directly into your spreadsheet. Here’s a piece of our sample Facebook Ads Campaigns export:

How do you export all Facebook ads?

It’s also very easy to export all ads from your ad accounts.

Follow the steps above to set up a Coupler.io importer. When choosing a Data entity, select List of Ads. It will fetch all the ads from the selected accounts.

Now, run the importer and the data will be imported into the destination of your choice.

How to export all of your targeting parameters in Facebook Ads?

The targeting parameters are available with the export of ad sets. That’s another data entity you can fetch with Coupler.io following the steps above.

When setting up, choose List of Ad sets as a Data entity.

Then, run the importer. Open the destination file. You’ll see various fields containing all the targeting parameters used with particular ad sets.

How do you export Facebook Ads spend per day?

This is also possible with Coupler.io. The information about daily spending on ads is available in the Reports and insights data entity. Before you proceed, you’ll need to specify several details.

Select the period for your reports. If you wish to fetch historical data, just pick the desired dates. 

For ongoing imports, it would make sense to use macros instead. For example, you could set {{yesterday}} as both the From and To field and have the importer run every morning. Each time, it would fetch the amount spent on ads the day before along with a number of other details, such as views, impressions, or conversions. There’s more information on using macros in our knowledge base.

Optionally, choose how you wish to split data by periods. Daily split is the default value for the entire reporting period.

Finally, select the columns to include in the report. You need the Amount spend column among the others.

Here’s a piece of our sample export that you can preview right in the UI:

How do you export results data from Facebook Ads?

As was the case for daily spending, the other results of your ad campaigns are also available in the Reports and insights data entity. Select it when setting up your importer. 

Select an Ad account for which you want to fetch the results. As was the case above, decide on the reporting period, how to split data, and the columns to include. The options are plentiful. A sample report will look like this:

How do you export leads from Facebook Ads?

At this point, it’s not possible to fetch leads automatically with Coupler.io. Instead, you can do this in two ways:

• Manually export leads into a .csv or .xlsx file.
• Use the leads_retrieval permission of Facebook’s Graph API to pull specific or all leads associated with your ads.

To fetch the leads manually:

• Jump to the Business Suite.
• Open the menu to the left, select All Tools and then find Instant Forms.

• Pick either of your forms and press Download next to it. You can either:
  • Download New Leads – fetch only the leads acquired since the last download, or
  • Download by Data Range – which will fetch all leads acquired in the selected range.
• Choose the desired format for export.

Note that leads will disappear 90 days after they’re acquired so it’s important to be running this process regularly.

What’s included in the user export data from Facebook Ads?

The standard export of leads contains:

• The ID of the lead.
• The ID & name of an ad, an ad set, and a campaign that led to capturing this lead.
• Form ID and name.
• Is_organic field that tells you whether a lead was obtained via organic measures.
• A platform that a lead used to leave their contacts
• Answers to any custom questions you added to the form.

Note that to see all this data, you need to meet two criteria:

• You need to be an admin of the respective Facebook page.
• You need to have the permissions sufficient to see all of the lead data in your ad account.

If you don’t fulfill either of these conditions, you may still be able to export the data but the export will be limited.

How to export data from Facebook Ads Manager?

Facebook Ads Manager is the center of reporting on ads. Here, you’ll see all campaigns, ad sets, and ads you’ve run and will be able to dig deeper into Facebook Ads management.

Before you export Facebook ads, first decide on precisely what you want to pull from Facebook. Select specific campaigns or opt to fetch all of them. Decide on one of the preset timeframes (e.g., “last 7 days”, “this month”, etc.) or pick a custom date. Finalize the details and then click on the Reports menu in the top-right corner of the page.

Then, select Export Table Data and pick the desired format. Among the available options are .csv and .xlsx. You can also get the data ready to be used with built-in Ads Reporting and Facebook Ads Manager for Excel.

If you picked .csv or .xlsx, you can now import it into the tool of your choice. .xlsx are mostly suitable for Excel, while .csv will work with virtually any tool willing to accept your data.

Export Facebook Ads Manager data to CSV every month

The method above requires you to manually export the report every time you need the fresh data. This won’t work for many. Luckily, there’s a way to automate the export of Facebook Ads data and have a report emailed to you at a chosen frequency.

Back on the Ads Manager homepage, click the Reports button once again. Choose to Create Custom Report. 

Here, decide on the type of report (pivot table, trend, or bar chart). Add any fields you would like and decide on the timeframe. As it will be a recurring report, using one of the presets makes sense. For a monthly report, a “last month” preset seems to make the most sense.

When you’re ready, press the button to the right of the report name.

Decide on the Ad Account. Then, toggle on Schedule Email. Choose when the report should be delivered and select who should receive it. Then, press Apply.

Note that you’ll only be able to add people with access to the Ads Manager as recipients. If you’d like to email an external stakeholder, you’ll need to download a report first and then send it to them manually. 

Alternatively, you can automatically export a Facebook Ads report into a dashboard or a tool of your choice. That’s something we’re going to discuss next.

Do I need to write a program to export Facebook Ads Manager data automatically?

Aside from this handy feature that emails you a report every now and then, Facebook doesn’t have automatic exporting capability. To schedule automatic data exports, you would normally need to delve into Facebook Ads API and write a script that would be querying specific endpoints at regular intervals.

However, you don’t need to do that as there are tools that can export Facebook Ads data for you. The Facebook Ads integration by Coupler.io is a popular choice among advertising specialists since it lets you pull the data into Google Sheets, Excel, BigQuery, Looker Studio, and Power BI on a chosen schedule. This approach doesn’t require any coding and is very quick to set up.

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• Access data that is always up to date by enabling refreshing data on a schedule as often as every 15 minutes.
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How to optimize Facebook Ads export?

The key to exporting Facebook Ads is in automating the process. 

Sure, you can export particular campaigns manually once they’ve run their course. You may also make it a habit to fetch a monthly report and present it to the team. All of these require planning and time that you could be spending elsewhere – for example, analyzing said data.

Don’t shy away from using data visualization tools for drawing charts, A/B testing, and monitoring the key metrics of your campaigns. It’s very easy to load the advertising data into such platforms and build dashboards that will quickly enhance your understanding of what’s happening inside your Ad Manager.

Thanks for reading!