How to export Meta Business Suite analytics for a client report

Meta Business Suite has an Export Data button on two different screens, and they don't produce the same file. Pull the wrong one and you'll spend twenty minutes wondering why the columns don't match last month's report.

Results or Content — pick the right one

Insights → Results gives you the Page-level roll-up: Page visits, Reach trend, an engagement overview for the period you picked. Good for the executive-summary numbers, useless for anything post-by-post.

Insights → Content gives you one row per post: Post Date, Post Text, Reach, Impressions, Likes & Reactions, Comments, Shares, Link Clicks. That's the file you want if the report breaks out top-performing posts or needs engagement totals you can sum yourself rather than trust the Results rollup for.

Both export as CSV. Both live under the same Insights menu. Neither export tells you which one you're holding once it's sitting in your downloads folder — rename it on the way out, or you'll be guessing later.

The 3-month wall

You can view up to about two years of history on the Insights screen itself, but the export only lets you pull three months at a time. A client on a quarterly retainer is fine. A year-in-review report means three separate CSVs, stitched together yourself, and it's easy to lose track of which three-month chunk you already have sitting on your desktop.

Audience demographics — age, gender, location breakdowns — aren't exportable at all. That data only exists on-screen. If a client wants audience composition in the report, you're taking a screenshot or typing the numbers by hand; there's no CSV for it.

What breaks a client report

1. Results and Content don't share column names. "Reach trend" in one file isn't the same figure as summing "Reach" across every post in the other — Results counts the Page's total unique reach for the period, Content counts reach per post, and posts reaching the same people twice will double-count. Don't reconcile them to each other; pick one as your source of truth and say which in the report if it matters.
2. One workspace, multiple connected accounts. If the client has both a Facebook Page and an Instagram account in the same Meta Business Suite, the account switcher at the top decides what you're looking at — export the wrong one and you've built a Facebook report out of Instagram numbers, or the other way round.
3. Engagement rate isn't in either export. Meta Business Suite doesn't compute it for you, so it has to be derived from engagements and reach yourself — divide by whichever the client's other reports use, and stay consistent month to month rather than switching the denominator.

Turning the file into the report

Two CSVs, two sets of column headers, a three-month cap to work around — none of that is the report itself, just the price of getting the data out. The report is still the part that takes a night: pasting into slides, redrawing the charts, writing something the client will actually read.

Poststeady recognises a Meta Business Suite export on sight — a file carrying Post reach, Accounts reached or Post impressions fingerprints as one automatically — and maps the columns from either the Results or the Content export onto reach, impressions, engagements, shares, comments and likes. Anything it can't place gets flagged for you to confirm once, and it remembers that mapping for next month's file. No API access to the client's Page required — you're uploading the same export you already downloaded by hand.