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How to Download Facebook Ad Report

Cody Schneider•

Pulling raw data out of Facebook Ads Manager gives you the power to analyze your campaign performance outside the limits of the platform's default dashboards. This guide will walk you through exactly how to customize and download your Facebook ad reports, and give you a few practical tips for what to do with the data once you have it.

Why Bother Downloading Your Facebook Ad Reports?

While Facebook's native Ads Manager offers a decent view of your campaigns, downloading the raw data unlocks a much deeper level of analysis. When you export your data, you move beyond pre-made dashboards and into a world of custom insights a spreadsheet or data tool makes possible.

Here’s why it’s worth the few extra clicks:

  • Deeper Analysis: Tools like Excel or Google Sheets allow you to slice, dice, and pivot your data in ways Ads Manager can't. You can create custom formulas, calculate unique metrics (like customer lifetime value vs. acquisition cost over time), and build an analysis that precisely matches your business goals.

  • Combining Data Sources: Your Facebook ads are just one piece of your marketing puzzle. To see the full picture, you need to combine your ad data with information from other platforms. By downloading a CSV, you can merge Facebook performance with data from Google Analytics, your CRM (like Salesforce or HubSpot), or your E-commerce platform (like Shopify) to track the full customer journey from first click to final sale.

  • Custom Dashboards and Visualizations: If you use BI tools like Power BI, Tableau, or even Google Looker Studio, exporting your data is the first step to building powerful, interactive dashboards. This allows you to track trends over the long term and visualize performance in a way that is clear and easy for anyone on your team to understand.

  • Archiving and Historical Tracking: Platforms change, and access can be fickle. Downloading your reports regularly creates a historical archive of your performance. This is invaluable for quarterly or annual reviews and ensures you have a permanent record of what worked, what didn't, and how your account has evolved.

  • Simplified Stakeholder Reporting: Not everyone on your team or at your company has (or needs) access to the backend of Facebook Ads Manager. Exporting a clean report allows you to share performance data with managers, clients, or other departments in a format that’s easy to read and understand without overwhelming them with the full interface.

Starting Point: A Quick Tour of Facebook Ads Manager

Before you can download anything, you need to know where to find the reporting tool itself. For many, Facebook Ads Manager can feel like a labyrinth. The tool you need is an often-overlooked feature called "Ads Reporting."

First, log in to your Meta Ads Manager. From the main campaigns view, look for the "All tools" menu, often represented by a hamburger icon (three horizontal lines) in the top-left corner. Click it to open up a suite of tools.

Under the "Analyze and Report" column, you’ll find Ads Reporting. This is your destination. Clicking this will take you to a dedicated reporting hub where you can create, view, edit, and export custom reports.

Step-by-Step: How to Create and Download a Custom Report

Once you’re in the Ads Reporting section, you can start building. While you can use a pre-built template, creating a report from scratch gives you full control. Let’s walk through the exact steps.

Step 1: Create a blank report

Within the Ads Reporting hub, click the green "Create report" button. It will give you a few options. For our purpose, select the "Build from scratch" route or start with a new "Blank report" to have a clean slate to work from. This opens the report builder interface.

Step 2: Set Your Date Range

The first thing you should always do is define the time period for your report. Near the top-right corner, you’ll see a date range filter (e.g., "Last 30 days"). Click on it to select from presets like "Today," "Yesterday," "Last 7 days," "This month," or select a custom start and end date using the calendar. This ensures a consistent report when you pull the data monthly or weekly.

Step 3: Define Your Metrics and Breakdowns

This is where you tell Facebook what data you actually want to see. This is handled by two main components in the right-hand sidebar menu: Metrics (your performance data) and Breakdowns (how you want to group or "slice" that data).

Choosing Your Metrics

Metrics are the quantifiable data points you use to measure performance. Think of them as the columns in your eventual spreadsheet.

Click on the "Metrics" tab in the right-hand panel. You can either search for the metrics you want or browse through the categories. Here are some of the most common and useful metrics to include:

  • Delivery & Spend: Impressions, Reach, Amount Spent, CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions).

  • Engagement: Clicks (All), CTR (Click-Through Rate), Post Engagements, Video Plays.

  • Performance: Results (e.g., Purchases, Leads), Cost per Result, Conversion Rate, ROAS (Return On Ad Spend).

Quick Tip: Think backwards from the question you're trying to answer. If you want to know which ads are most cost-effective, you'll need "Campaign Name," "Ad Set Name," "Amount Spent," "Results," and "Cost per Result." If you want to analyze the creative you made, you'd add metrics like "CTR", "Thumbnail image." Don’t feel the need to select everything - a focused report is more useful than one with 50 columns of data you'll never look at.

Slicing Your Data with "Breakdowns"

Breakdowns are the power feature of Facebook Ads reporting. They allow you to segment your chosen metrics by different variables. This is how you discover deeper insights about your audience and placements.

Switch to the "Breakdowns" tab. Common breakdowns include:

  • By Time: Day, Week, or Month. This is perfect for seeing performance trends over time. For example, do your costs per purchase go up on weekends? A "Day" breakdown will tell you.

  • By Delivery: Age, Gender, Placement (e.g., Facebook Feed vs. Instagram Stories vs. Audience Network), Platform (Facebook vs. Instagram), and Device. This is critical for understanding who your ads are resonating with and where a majority of your revenue is coming from.

  • By Action: Conversion Device. This one is super informative, showing you if a user saw an ad on their mobile device but ultimately made the purchase on their desktop computer (or vice versa).

You can even use multiple breakdowns at once (e.g., Age + Gender) to get super granular with your data.

Step 4: Generate and Export Report

As you add metrics and breakdowns, your report will automatically update in the main window. This gives you a chance to review the data to make sure it looks correct and includes all the information you need.

When you're happy with the setup, look for the "Export" button in the top right corner. Clicking this button will give you a couple of formatting options:

Select your desired file format:

  • Export as .csv: this is great to easily upload to other tools or to import into a Google Sheet

  • Export as .png: if you just want to export an image of your report

  • Export as a .xlsx Microsoft Excel file: if you plan on diving into the ad spend in Microsoft Excel

After clicking your file type, your browser will download the file. Now you’re ready for analysis!

4 Pro Tips for Analyzing Your Exported Facebook Ad Data

Downloading the data is only half the battle. Here are a few practical tips for making your data more insightful and effective for your business.

1. Standardize and Automate Reports with Scheduled Emails

Doing a report once is great to learn, but repeating this process every week is a waste of your time. Instead, you can schedule reports to be automatically emailed to you and your team.

Save your report and then click the "Share" button. In the pop-up, you can add the email addresses of recipients and set a schedule (e.g., "Every Monday at 9 AM"). This hands-off approach ensures everyone gets consistent data without you having to manually run the report each time.

2. Analyze the Initial Days of Ad Campaigns

Ever wish you could isolate data in the first 3 or 4 days after you launch ads to quickly analyze the return? The typical date selector in your Ads dashboard only allows you to select absolute dates, not relative ones, creating limits on your campaign analysis.

After you export your ads' data, you want to include "Date start," which will be pulled with your raw CSV, and then filter your dashboard to select ads within your desired timeframe - typically within 7 days. This will also make sense for ads with higher learning budgets that don't need significant spend levels or require a large minimum number of conversions for deep post-campaign analysis after it has ended.

A simple report will then be able to answer questions like: Did my ads meet the sales level or conversion goal I originally set? Were there any early success indicators? Are any early ad indicators - like click volume or conversion data levels - being passed onto lead, opportunity win rate?

3. Use Pivot Tables in a Spreadsheet

A PivotTable is one of the most powerful tools in any spreadsheet program. It allows you to summarize huge datasets quickly. For example, once you’ve exported your data, you can import your .csv into a Google sheet and create a PivotTable to instantly answer questions like:

  • What is the total spend and total number of purchases for each campaign?

  • Which age group provides the best Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)?

  • How does CTR differ between Instagram Feed and Facebook Feed placements?

If you've never used a PivotTable before, there are tons of tutorials online for Excel and Google Sheets, and investing 15 minutes to learn them will save you hundreds of hours in the long run.

4. Combine Facebook Data with Your Other Data Sources

Your real business insights are found where your reports overlap. Mapping conversions or your lead tracking to the final business revenue not only helps to create the full marketing sales funnel but also directly helps attribute ROI back towards your ad spending. With that in mind, once you’ve downloaded your report, you should think about importing it into a spreadsheet with reporting pulls from other systems you own whether that be a Google Sheet or a Microsoft Excel Workbook.

Final Thoughts

Learning how to download and manually format reports is a key data analysis skill, but that doesn't mean it's the most efficient process. The entire cycle of downloading CSVs, cleaning them up, and refreshing reports on a recurring schedule shows just how much time is lost to routine reporting tasks that should really take you no more than a few minutes a week at most.

At Graphed, we automate the entire reporting process for thousands of marketers. Instead of downloading CSVs, we connect directly to Facebook Ads and any of the other apps you use and have it all in one updated place in real time every time without any code. From there, you just chat with your AI marketing data analyst and tell it in plain English what reports you want, and they automatically build and update your dashboards for you and your team. This provides live, shareable dashboards without anyone ever having to export a spreadsheet again.