How do I Export data from Facebook ad Manager?

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Export segments to Facebook Ads Manager (preview)

Article
12/22/2022
2 minutes to read

Prerequisites

A Facebook Ads Account that includes a Facebook Business Account.
Administrator privileges on the Facebook Ads Account.
Custom Audience Terms need to be accepted by the user setting up the connection in Customer Insights.

Known limitations

Up to 10 million customer profiles per export to Facebook Ads Manager, which can take up to 90 minutes.
Segments only.
Facebook Ads integration doesn't support users with more than 25 ad accounts.
Facebook customer list type in custom audiences only.
Note
In some cases, you might see custom audiences of different types in the dropdown list. If you select a different type other than customer list, the export fails.

Set up connection to Facebook Ads Manager

You must be an administrator in Customer Insights to add a connection.

Go to Admin > Connections.
Select Add connection and choose Facebook Ads Manager.
Give your connection a recognizable name in the Display name field. The name and the type of the connection describe this connection. We recommend choosing a name that explains the purpose and target of the connection.
Allow contributors to use the connection for exports.
Authenticate with Facebook Ads:
1. Select Continue with Facebook to sign in to your Facebook Ads account.
2. Allow the ads_management permission after authenticating with Facebook.
3. Select the Facebook Ads Account that you want to work with.
4. Select an Existing custom audience from the dropdown list or create a New custom audience.
Review the data privacy and compliance and select I agree.
Select Save to complete the connection.

Configure an export

To configure this export, you must have permission for this connection type.

Go to Data > Exports.
Select Add export.
In the Connection for export field, choose a connection from the Facebook Ads Manager section. Contact an administrator if no connection is available.
Enter a name for the export.
In the Connect data field, select Email, Name and address, or Phone to send to Facebook Ads Manager.
Map the corresponding attributes from your unified customer entity for the selected key identifier.

Tip
The best chances for a match occur if you select Email as key identifier. Adding additional identifiers may improve the matching.
Select Add attribute to map more attributes to send to Facebook Ads Manager. Attributes from Facebook Ads Manager are mapping to the following user-friendly names: FN = First Name, LN = Last Name, FI = First Initial, PHONE = Phone, GEN = Gender, DOB = Date of birth, ST = State, CT = City, ZIP = Postal code / ZIP Code, COUNTRY = Country / Region
Note
All personal data is sent as a hashed value to Facebook.
Select the segments you want to export.
Select Save.

Saving an export doesn't run the export immediately. The export runs with every scheduled refresh. You can also export data on demand.

Feedback

Submit and view feedback for

Additional resources

Export Your Facebook Ads Data

To start, you’ll first need to download your data from Facebook Ads into a spreadsheet.

You can do so by following a few easy steps.

Customize Your Columns
Add Breakdowns
Select Your Dates
Export Your Data

Customize Your Columns

The first step is to customize your data columns so you can include the most relevant metrics for your analysis.

To do so, access your Ads Manager interface and hit the “Columns” button in the main ribbon. Then, click on “Customize Columns”.

For instance, if you’re managing an eCommerce store, you may want to include metrics such as:

Purchase Conversion Value
ROAS
Adds to Cart
Checkouts Initiated

Add Breakdowns

In the next step, you’ll want to add as many relevant breakdowns as you can.

In short, breakdowns are additional dimensions for analyzing your data, such as placements, dates, regions, and others.

To do so, you can click on the “Breakdown” drop-down and choose your preferred breakdown. Note that, in some cases, you can’t combine multiple breakdowns simultaneously, so choose wisely.

This is an essential step since this will give your data an added level of granularity which will help you find patterns you might’ve easily missed otherwise.

Select Your Date Range for Analysis

Next, you’ll want to select the date range where you’ll make your analysis.

Typically, you’ll want to choose a time window that’s big enough so that your analysis can be statistically significant. In other words, make sure you’re not trying to find patterns in your data from 10 clicks or $50 in ad spend.

To do so, in the top right of your ads manager, select your date ranges and hit “Update”.

Export Your Data

The final step is the easiest: to export your data.

In the main menu, right next to the “Breakdown” button, click on “Reports” and then “Export Table Data”.

Then, choose “Export as .xls” - or any other options, if you prefer. I prefer to uncheck the “Include Summary Row” for cleaner data.

Secret Trick to Adding More Dimensions in Your Analysis (Optional)

While this is an optional step, it's highly recommended because of the amount of data you can get from it you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

As we’ve discussed, Facebook doesn’t give us too many options when it comes to the breakdowns you’re able to export. Plus, you can’t combine too many breakdowns at the same time.

So how do we go around this issue?

This is where account naming conventions come into play.

Facebook Ads Account Naming Conventions

Naming conventions are important because not only do they allow us to navigate our accounts better, but they also give us extra granularity in the data we’re analyzing.

By adding a few “labels” to our campaign names, we can add more breakdowns than those given to us by Facebook.

Here’s an example of how we would name one of our campaigns.

Prospecting (ToF) - Conversion: Purchase - CBO - 30% Off - 15.11.2021

In the scenario above, we can easily tell multiple things about the campaign:

Stage: Top of the Funnel (ToF)
Campaign Objective: Conversion (Purchase Event)
Budget Type: CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization)
Offer: 30% Off
Date: 15.11.2021

There are many additional “labels” (or breakdowns) you can add to your naming conventions. Here are a few ideas:

Creative Type: Images, Videos, Carousels, etc.
Audience Type: Interests, Lookalikes, Remarketing
Video Length: 15s, 30s
Landing Page: variant A, variant B
Creative Type: UGC, Testimonial, Endorsements
Any other segment you like

But how exactly do we use this information to our advantage? Keep on reading; we’ll show you how.

Use PolymerSearch to Automatically Identify Valuable Patterns

Upload Your Data to PolymerSearch

Now that you have your spreadsheet ready, it’s time to upload it to PolymerSearch so it can help you quickly identify patterns and trends in your data.

Head over to https://polymersearch.com and sign up for free. It takes less than a minute.

Once logged in, click on the “Upload CSV or XLS” button and choose your spreadsheet.

We’re almost at the fun part.

Enrich Your Data with Polymer’s “Array Separator” (Optional)

If you skipped the “Optimize Your Fields for Extra Granularity” section, feel free to skip this one too.

To access the information from your naming conventions, you’ll need to clean up your data, so it’s easily accessible to Polymer’s AI.

In other words, you’ll need to split your “Campaign Name” (or whatever other column you want to break down) with Polymer’s “Array Separator” feature.

To do so, click on the “Customize App” in the main menu’s settings.

Then, click on “Columns Settings” and select the column you want to customize. In this case, “Campaign Name”.

Finally, scroll down to the “Split the raw value as an array using a custom separator” and type in the separator you want to use. In our case above, the “-“ (dash) sign.

With this change, we have now created multiple different columns as below:

Prospecting (ToF) – [Stage]
Conversions: Purchase – [Objective]
CBO – [Budget Type]
Offer – [30% Off]
15.11.2021 [Date Launched]

Now, onto the fun part!

Get Automated Insights with Polymer’s Powerful AI

Now we get to the easy (and fun!) part: getting meaningful insights for your business.

To start, once you’ve uploaded and customized your spreadsheet data, all you need to do is launch your app.

Then, in the main menu, enable the “Auto Insights” toggle.

‍

Use Polymer’s Auto Explainer for Automated Insights

One of the many great features in PolymerSearch is the Auto-Explainer tool.

In short, this tool allows you to simply enter a metric of your choice and it will automatically show you which columns have the highest outlier for that particular metric.

Here’s an example.

In the image above, we added “Purchase Conversion Value” as our metric and quickly discovered a few insights.

In moments, we can see that Polymer suggested that the column “Ad Name”, in particular the ad “image-lifestyle-monthly…”, drove significantly more revenue than the dataset’s average (+1,440%), compared to other ads.

By clicking on that specific ad - you can simply click on the label - we can easily filter our results so we can dig deeper into that particular dataset.

In this case, Polymer’s automated insights highlighted that women aged 35-44 were performing pretty well. Interesting!

Now, within another click, simply by adding gender to our breakdowns, we can confirm that men, particularly, don’t perform too well with this particular ad.

But that’s just the start of it. How can we dig deeper into our data?

Add Multiple Dimensions/Breakdowns

Now, while the above may have been an interesting find, the real benefit Polymer brings on top of traditional spreadsheets is how easy it is to make multidimensional analysis within a few simple clicks.

As you know, spreadsheets with a lot of columns and rows can make it hard to pinpoint which segment of data is actually driving results.

With Polymer, that’s easy.

By adding “Age” and “Gender” as additional breakdowns, for example, we can now draw a few additional insights.

Clearly, younger men don’t seem to respond well to the offer in this ad. However…

It seems the same doesn’t apply for men +55 years old.

Can we learn something from this information?

Calculate Your Own Metrics

Another great feature in Polymer is the ability to calculate your own custom metrics.

Now, let’s see what other insights we can find in our data set.

Instead of using our “Purchase Conversion Value” metric, let’s calculate our return on ad spend (ROAS) by adding “Amount Spent” to our “Minimize” field.

Then, let’s sort our metrics by ROI.

Next, we added “Creative Type”, “Media Type”, and “Angles” to our analysis.

‍

Very quickly, we can tell that video product reviews, particularly about the marketing angle “clean food” are working out pretty well.

On the other hand, video testimonial reviews have accounted for 20% of our ad spend with literally no sales. Now that’s a problem.

These are only a few small examples of the type of insights you can find with PolymerSearch.

Conclusion

There are plenty of other use cases with Polymer’s AI, but if we were to explain them all, this would become an extremely lengthy post so instead you can check out these other posts:

How to analyze marketing data for best ROI
How to analyze survey data
Turn your spreadsheet into an interactive web application in minutes
Interactive tutorial on pivot tables

We have written a separate post on finding winning Facebook ad creatives before, so feel free to check it out for some additional ideas on how to use Polymer.

How do I extract data from ad Manager?

Export Ad Manager reports.

Create and run a report..

When you view your report, click Export at the top of your report and choose the settings for your exported file. ... .

Select the file format in which you'd like to receive the report..

How do I download reports from Facebook Ads Manager?

Download your delivery reports Choose your campaign, ad set or ad. Hover over it, then choose View chart. Select Platform to see your delivery displayed as a bar chart. Select Download reports below the bar chart.