With over 2.8 billion monthly active users, Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms for both individuals and businesses. As a result, many Facebook page admins and marketers rely on Facebook Insights to track and analyze their page’s performance.
Facebook Insights provides a wealth of data on your page’s followers, reach, engagement, and more. This allows you to identify trends, optimize your content strategy, and make data-driven decisions to boost results.
One of the most useful features in Facebook Insights is the ability to export your page data. Exporting your insights provides a way to download the raw data for further analysis and integration with other tools.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk through the process of exporting your Facebook Insights data step-by-step.
Benefits of Exporting Facebook Insights Data
Here are some of the key reasons you may want to export your Facebook Insights data:
- Conduct deeper analysis – Exporting your data allows you to analyze it further using Excel, Google Sheets, BI tools, etc.
- Create custom reports – You can create customized reports tailored to your business needs.
- Identify historical trends – With access to historical data, you can identify trends and seasonality in your metrics over time.
- Integrate with other tools – Exporting insights enables you to import the data into other platforms like Google Analytics, SEMRush, etc. for additional analysis.
- Save data for record keeping – If you ever need to go back and reference your Facebook metrics data, you’ll have the historical records.
In summary, downloading your Facebook Insights provides greater flexibility to analyze, report on, learn from, and take action based on your Facebook page’s performance data.
How to Download Facebook Insights Data
Let’s go through the step-by-step process to export your Facebook Insights data:
Step 1: Navigate to Facebook Insights
First, log into your Facebook page and click on “Insights” in the left side menu. This will bring you to the Facebook Insights dashboard.
Step 2: Choose the Data Range
At the top of the Insights dashboard, you can choose the date range for the data you want to export. You can export up to 2 years of historical data.
Select the desired start and end dates to specify the date range.
Step 3: Open the Export Data Dialog
Once you’ve set the date range, click on the three dots beside “Export Data” on the right side of the screen. This will open up the export data configuration dialog.
Step 4: Select Metrics to Export
In the export data dialog, you can select which metrics you want to download data for. The different categories of metrics are shown in the left sidebar.
Check the boxes next to each metric you want to include in the export. You can select metrics across multiple categories.
Step 5: Choose Export Options
Next, choose the following export options:
- Time increment – Select daily, weekly, or monthly data.
- File format – Choose either CSV or XLSX file format.
- Language – Pick the language for the exported file.
Step 6: Export Insights Data
Once you’ve selected all the options, click “Export Data” at the bottom right. This will begin processing your data export request.
Depending on the amount of data, it may take a few minutes for Facebook to export the insights data and prepare the file.
Step 7: Download Exported Insights File
After the export has been processed, you will receive a notification from Facebook. Click on “Download” to download the exported CSV or Excel file containing your selected Facebook Insights data.
Now you have a copy of your page’s metrics that you can save or analyze further as needed!
Exporting Video Insights
In addition to your Facebook page insights, you can also export insights data for your Facebook videos:
- Go to your Facebook page and click “Videos” in the left menu.
- Select the video you want to export insights for.
- In the left sidebar of the video dashboard, click “See All Video Insights”.
- Follow the same instructions above to open the export dialog, choose metrics, and export the video insights data.
Analyzing Exported Facebook Insights
Once you’ve downloaded your exported Facebook Insights data, there are lots of ways you can analyze and work with the data:
- Open the CSV/Excel file in Excel or Google Sheets.
- Generate charts and graphs to visualize trends and performance.
- Calculate additional metrics like engagement rate, click-through rate, etc.
- Build custom reports and dashboards tailored to your business goals.
- Connect the data to tools like Tableau, Domo, Looker, etc. to build interactive reports.
- Analyze changes over time periods, across demographics, by content type, etc.
- Combine with data from other sources to analyze cross-channel performance.
- Feed the data into machine learning models to predict future performance.
The possibilities are endless in terms of how you can leverage your exported Facebook metrics data to gain valuable insights!
Tips for Exporting Facebook Insights
Keep these tips in mind when exporting your Facebook Insights data:
- Export consistently – Build the habit of exporting your data at regular intervals, whether weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.
- Be selective – Only choose the metrics you really need to avoid overly large, confusing data sets.
- Check date ranges – Ensure date ranges capture full time periods and intervals.
- Use daily data – Daily granularity provides maximum flexibility for analysis.
- Clean the data – Once exported, clean up the data by removing unnecessary columns, calculating new metrics, etc.
- Automate – Look into automating Facebook Insights data exports via tools like Zapier or the Facebook API.
Facebook Insights Export Limits
Facebook does place some limits on how much insights data you can export:
- You can export up to 2 years of historical data per page.
- File exports are limited to 250,000 rows of data.
- You are limited to 100 insights export requests per day per Facebook account.
If you hit the row limits, try segmenting your data exports into smaller date ranges.
Exporting Insights via Facebook API
For developers, Facebook also provides a Graph API to programmatically access and export insights data. This allows you to build custom scripts and automate data exports.
Here are some resources on the Facebook Graph API:
The Graph API provides advanced capabilities for pulling Facebook metrics data into your own databases and systems.
Conclusion
Exporting your Facebook Insights data provides powerful analytics capabilities for optimizing your social media marketing efforts. You can tap into a wealth of data on your Facebook page’s followers, reach, engagement, video performance, and more.
By regularly exporting your key Facebook metrics and analyzing the data, you can gain valuable insights into your target audience and how your content resonates. The added flexibility of working with the raw data allows you to customize reports, identify trends and opportunities, and make data-driven decisions to boost your Facebook marketing success.
So in summary, exporting Facebook Insights:
- Enables deeper analysis beyond the built-in Facebook reports
- Allows you to create customized analytics reports aligned to your business
- Helps reveal trends and performance over time
- Facilitates integration with other data analysis platforms
- Provides historical records of your Facebook page performance
We encourage all marketers, analysts, and Facebook page admins to tap into this valuable data source by regularly exporting and analyzing their Facebook Insights.