How to export LinkedIn Page analytics (it's an XLS, not CSV)

LinkedIn's Page analytics export is the only one of the big four that doesn't hand you a CSV. It hands you an XLS file, split across six categories you have to download one at a time.

You have a 12-month window

LinkedIn keeps Page analytics for the past 12 months. Past that, it drops off the dashboard and there is no way to pull it back. The export range runs from the last 7 days up to a full year, so a year is both the most you can ask for and the most that exists.

That's more generous than Instagram's 90 days, and it lulls people into leaving it. The problem arrives at the annual review, when a client wants this year against last year and the earlier half has already aged out. If you take over a Page and do one thing on day one, pull the full 12 months and put the file somewhere permanent — it is the only copy of that history you will ever be able to make.

Where the export button lives

You need admin access to the Page, not just a personal profile. From the Page admin view, open Analytics in the left menu, then pick a category — Visitors, Content (called Updates in the file), Followers, Competitors, Leads or Employee Advocacy. Each one is its own screen with its own Export button in the top right.

Click Export, choose a date range, click Export again. What downloads is an XLS spreadsheet, not a CSV — and there is no setting anywhere that changes that. If the report tool you're feeding it only takes CSV, you open the file and use Save As, or drop it into Google Sheets and download that as CSV. It's an extra step every other platform in this series skips.

What's actually in the file

Six categories, six separate downloads, and none of the files share a shape. Three of them are worth pulling for a client report:

The other three don't belong in a monthly report. Competitors benchmarks your Page against others, not your own numbers. Leads is only populated if you're running lead-gen forms on boosted posts. Employee Advocacy tracks how your own team engages with content you've asked them to share. None of the three describe how the Page itself performed.

The three things that trip people up

1. Organic, sponsored and total sit side by side as separate columns on almost every metric. Grab the organic impressions column when the Page also ran sponsored posts that month, and you've quietly reported a fraction of the real reach.
2. "Unique impressions" is LinkedIn's name for reach — it's the count of distinct members who saw a post, not a running total of views. There is no column literally labelled Reach.
3. Each category has its own date picker and they don't line up automatically. Pull Updates for 1–30 June and Followers for a slightly different window, and your engagement rate is quietly dividing by the wrong follower count.

The third one is the quiet killer, because the result still looks like a number. An engagement rate computed from June's engagements over May's follower count is not flagged anywhere — it is simply wrong by a few percent, every month, in a direction you cannot predict. Set every category to the same date range before you export any of them, and check the first and last row of each file agree.

The organic-versus-total split deserves its own warning, because getting it wrong understates your own work in a way that is hard to walk back. If a Page ran sponsored posts and you report the organic column, you have handed the client a number smaller than what actually happened — and next month, if you notice and switch to total, your reach appears to have jumped enormously for no reason you can explain. Now you are having a conversation about your reporting rather than about their results.

Default to total, say in the report that figures include sponsored, and stay there. If the client specifically wants organic performance isolated, report both columns side by side rather than swapping which one you show.

The XLS problem, and the clean fix

Page analytics exports as XLS. Campaign Manager — the ads side — exports as CSV. That inconsistency inside one product is a small thing that costs real minutes, because most reporting tools expect CSV and the Page export is the one you pull most often.

The fix is mechanical: open the XLS and Save As CSV, or drop it into Google Sheets and download as CSV. What matters is doing it the same way every month. Converting through different routes can change how dates are written — a column that reads 01/06/2026 in one file and 2026-06-01 in another is the kind of difference that turns into a mis-dated report, and date columns are unforgiving because a wrong one can file a month's numbers under the wrong month entirely.

Pick one conversion route, use it for every client, and the dates stay consistent by default rather than by vigilance.

Turning the file into the report

Three spreadsheets is already more than most clients want to see, and none of them say whether the month was good. That's still a separate write-up — pasting the Updates tab into a deck doesn't answer the one question a client actually has.

Poststeady recognises a LinkedIn export by its column shape — the organic/sponsored/total split is distinctive enough that it fingerprints on its own, no filename guessing involved. It maps the total columns onto reach, impressions, engagements, engagement rate, clicks, follower growth and video views by default, since total is what a client actually cares about. Anything it gets wrong you correct once on the mapping screen, and it remembers the correction for next month's file.

Follower growth is the one metric allowed to go negative — a Page can genuinely lose followers in a month. Every other number gets treated as bad data if it shows up negative, which is usually a sign you pulled the wrong column.

The monthly checklist

1. On a new Page, export the full 12 months on day one. Past that it is gone.
2. You need admin access to the Page. A personal profile will not do it.
3. Pull Updates, Followers and Visitors. Skip Competitors, Leads and Employee Advocacy.
4. Set the same date range on every category before exporting any of them.
5. Take the total columns, not organic, whenever the Page also ran sponsored posts.
6. Remember unique impressions is reach. There is no Reach column.
7. Convert XLS to CSV the same way every month so the date format never shifts.