Connect Data from Facebook Ads to Excel Power Query
You can get your Facebook Ads data into Excel Power Query to make more informed business decisions. This simple and quick guide gives you easy instructions on how you can extract your data from Facebook Ads and then analyze it in Excel Power Query. You can integrate Excel Power Query with multiple data sources, such as databases, spreadsheets, social media, and any on-premise software or existing cloud-based solution. Integrate your Facebook Ads with Excel Power Query to turn your Facebook Ads data into actionable insights. If the process of extracting data from your Facebook Ads seems too complex, you can use Improvado, which will make this process a breeze.
Facebook is the world's most popular social network, equipped with a powerful advertising network where billions of dollars are spent each year. Marketers love using Facebook Ads ads to reach their target audience at scale.
Power Query is a great Excel add-in that you can use for data discovery, combining data coming from multiple sources and reshaping your Facebook Ads data. It is an add-in that was introduced in MS Excel 2013 by Microsoft. When you get your data from a file, an external data source, or a data dump/import it comes into MS Excel in a messy and unworkable format.
Excel Power Query is a great way to access, clean and transform all that messy data and then display it in a way that MS Excel prefers and can work with. Power Query also allows you to search and discover valuable data across the enterprise or from several public data sources that are available online and from a variety of other data sources.
Extracting data
Before loading your data into Excel Power Query, you will have to prep it first. If you don't already have a data structure in which to store the data you retrieve, you'll have to create a schema for your data tables. Then, for each value in the response, you'll need to identify a predefined datatype (INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) and build a table that can receive them.
Facebook Ads's documentation should tell you what fields are provided by each endpoint, along with their corresponding datatypes. Complicating things is the fact that the records retrieved from the source may not always be "flat" – some of the objects may actually be lists. In these cases you'll likely have to create additional tables to capture the unpredictable cardinality in each record.
Preparing data
You have three options for extracting data from Facebook:
- You can retrieve data programmatically through the Facebook Ads Insights API. It is available to all users who use the platform. Follow the API documentation, and you will enjoy access to endpoints, like impressions, CTRs, and CPC. You can access the API through the SDKs which Facebook offers. Officially, the platforms support SDKs for PHP and Python, while there’re also a number of SDKs (community supported) for languages such as R, Ruby, and JavaScript. Data will be returned in either CSV or XLS format, and when your report is ready based on the request you may access it from a URL.
- You can export a report that you have created and saved. All you have to do is navigate to Ads reporting from the Facebook Ads Manager navigation and click on the report and then click Export.
- You can use a tool like Improvado. By leveraging Improvado, you can easily and quickly integrate, connect, and see all your Facebook Ads Insights data flow seamlessly into your desired visualization tool or database. Improvado does not require any technical skills to operate. You can sync your data over with just a few clicks.
Loading data
The first thing that you have to do is import your data. All you have to do is go to the Data tab and then press the Get Data command.
Now choose From File and in the resulting menu choose from Workbook. You will now see a file picker menu, and you can navigate to the MS Excel file with the data that you would like to import. Once you have selected the file that you want to import, you will be presented with a Navigator window.
The window will allow you to select the relevant sheets from your workbook which contains the data you want to import. You can see a preview of the data on the right-hand side when you are selecting the sheets. If your workbook has more than one data sheet, which you wanted to import, you can easily select more than one sheet using the Select multiple items checkbox.
Note that this will create a separate query for each sheet that you have selected. This will save you from going through the first couple of steps individually. You can now either choose to Load your data or Edit it. Keep in mind that if you decide to load the data, then it would load into an Excel Table without any transformations applied. You can also edit the data, and this is where you will be able to apply your data cleaning transformations.
Keeping data up to date
If you've made it this far, congrats! You probably have written a program or script to extract your data and move it into Excel Power Query.
Now it's time to think about how you will keep this data up-to-date by loading updated or new data. Of course, you can just replicate all your data every time you have updated your records, but that would be extremely manual and time-consuming.
Luckily there is a better way. The key is building your script so that it can sense incremental updates made to the data.
Thankfully, Facebook’s API results include fields like "date" so that you can identify those records which are new since the last update you made (or since the most recent record you have copied). Once you have taken new data into consideration, you can easily set your script either as a continuous loop or cron job to pull down new data as soon as it appears.
The Easiest And Fastest Way To Do It
If all this sounds a bit overwhelming, don't worry -- there is an easier way to get this done!
Thankfully, products like Improvado were developed to move data from Facebook to Excel Power Query automatically. Using Improvado, you can easily combine the most crucial and relevant data from your social media ad campaign into a dashboard. You can then connect this data to Excel Power Query.
