How to Connect Facebook to Looker Studio

Transforming your raw Facebook campaign data into a clear, shareable, and insightful dashboard gives you a massive advantage. But if you’ve ever tried to connect Facebook to Looker Studio, you know it isn’t as straightforward as linking two Google products. This guide cuts through the confusion, showing you the exact methods to pull your Facebook data into Looker Studio so you can start visualizing performance and making smarter decisions today.

Why Bother Connecting Facebook to Looker Studio?

Before getting into the "how," it's helpful to understand the "why." Spending a little time on this setup unlocks some powerful benefits that are simply impossible to achieve within Facebook Ads Manager alone.

• A Single Source of Truth: Your marketing efforts don’t happen in a vacuum. By bringing Facebook data into Looker Studio, you can place it right alongside metrics from Google Analytics, Google Ads, your email platform, and YouTube. This creates a holistic view of your entire marketing funnel, letting you see how social campaigns directly influence website traffic, conversions, and customer behavior.
• Fully Customizable Dashboards: Facebook Ads Manager is rigid. It shows you what it wants to show you, how it wants to show it. Looker Studio gives you a blank canvas. You can build reports tailored to specific audiences - a high-level KPI overview for executives, a granular creative performance report for your team, or a campaign summary for clients. You control the layout, branding, colors, and the exact story your data tells.
• Deeper, Cross-Channel Insights: When all your data lives in one place, you start to spot patterns you’d otherwise miss. Did that new Facebook video campaign lead to a spike in branded search on Google? How does your cost per lead on Facebook compare to Google Ads in real-time? These are the kinds of questions a consolidated dashboard can help you answer instantly.
• Automated, Hands-Off Reporting: The a-ha moment for many marketers is realizing this setup kills manual reporting. Once your dashboard is built, it refreshes automatically. Gone are the days of spending hours at the end of each month exporting CSVs, wrestling with spreadsheets, and copy-pasting screenshots into a slide deck. The report is always on, always up to date, and always ready to be shared with a simple link.

The Big Hurdle: Facebook Doesn't Directly Talk to Looker Studio

Here’s the core challenge you’ll face: there is no native, free connector for Facebook developed by Google. If you’ve ever connected Google Analytics to Looker Studio, you know how easy it is - you just find it in the list, click authorize, and you’re done. Because Facebook and Google are direct competitors, that level of seamless integration doesn’t exist.

This means we have to create our own bridge to get the data from Point A (Facebook) to Point B (Looker Studio). Luckily, there are a couple of well-established ways to do this, each with its own pros and cons:

1. Using a Third-Party Connector: This is the automated, powerful, and recommended method for anyone serious about reporting. It involves using a service that acts as a middleman.
2. The Manual Google Sheets Method: This is the free option. It involves manually exporting data from Facebook and using Google Sheets as the bridge, but it comes with significant limitations.

Let's walk through both methods step-by-step.

Method 1: Using a Third-Party Connector (The Recommended Route)

Third-party connectors are tools explicitly designed to solve this problem. They connect directly to Facebook's API on one end and Looker Studio on the other, seamlessly piping data from your ad account into your reports. While most of these are paid services, the time they save and the reliability they offer are almost always worth the modest investment.

Popular Facebook to Looker Studio Connectors

Searching the Looker Studio Connector Gallery will bring up dozens of options. A few of the most reputable and widely-used include:

• Supermetrics: Perhaps the most well-known player in this space. It’s robust, reliable, and offers a ton of options for customizing the data you pull. It tends to be on the pricier side but is considered a gold standard by many agencies and in-house teams.
• Power My Analytics: A strong competitor to Supermetrics, often at a more accessible price point. It works very similarly and connects to a wide array of marketing platforms.
• Windsor.ai: Known for its fair pricing, especially for users who need to blend data from many sources. It’s a great option if you need to connect more than just Facebook.

Most reputable connectors offer a free trial, so you can test them out before committing.

Step-by-Step: Connecting Facebook Using a Partner Connector

The exact user interface will vary slightly between providers, but the overall process is always the same. Here's a general guide:

Step 1: Choose and Sign Up for a Connector

Start by visiting the website of your chosen provider (like Supermetrics or Power My Analytics) and signing up for an account, usually starting with a free trial.

Step 2: Start a New Data Source in Looker Studio

Head over to your Looker Studio account. Click the Create button in the top left and select Data Source. This will open the connector gallery.

Step 3: Find and Select Your Connector

In the search bar at the top of the gallery, type the name of the connector you signed up for. Click on it to begin the authorization process.

Step 4: Authorize Access to Your Accounts

You’ll now go through a two-part authorization dance. First, Looker Studio will ask for permission to use this third-party connector. Click Allow. Second, the connector service itself will ask you to log into your Facebook account and give it permission to access your Ads Manager data. You'll be prompted to select the specific ad accounts you want to work with.

Step 5: Configure Your Data Source

This is where you tell the connector exactly what data you want to pull from Facebook. This is the most important step! You'll typically be presented with a configuration screen with several options:

• Ad Accounts: Select the specific Facebook Ad Account(s) you want to include in this data source.
• Date Range: You can set a fixed range, but the real power comes from dynamic ranges like "Last 30 days" or "This quarter to date." This is what enables automated reporting.
• Metrics and Dimensions: This is the heart of your data source.
  • Metrics are the numbers you want to measure (e.g., Amount Spent, Impressions, Link Clicks, CP L).
  • Dimensions are the things you want to measure your metrics by (e.g., Date, Campaign Name, Ad Set Name, Device).
  For a basic campaign performance report, you might select: Date, Campaign Name, Amount Spent, Impressions, Reach, Link Clicks, and CPC. For a creative analysis, you could swap in dimensions like Ad Name, Ad Creative Image, or Body Text.

Once you’ve configured everything, click Connect in the upper right corner.

Step 6: Create Your Report

You’ll now see a screen showing all the dimensions and metrics you just selected. Click the blue Create Report button. Looker Studio will add your new Facebook connection as a data source, and you can start building tables, charts, and scorecards just like you would with any Google data source.

Method 2: The Manual Google Sheets Workaround (Free, but with Limits)

If you have absolutely no budget or just need a simple, one-time report, you can use Google Sheets as a manual go-between. The workflow is exactly as it sounds: you export from Facebook, import into Google Sheets, and then connect Google Sheets to Looker Studio.

When Is This Method a Good Fit?

Be realistic about this approach. It’s suitable for:

• Single-use reports where data doesn't need to be refreshed.
• Very high-level monthly summaries for internal teams.
• Learning the basics of Looker Studio without a financial commitment.

Step-by-Step: Connecting Facebook via Google Sheets

Step 1: Export Your Data from Facebook Ads Manager

Navigate to Facebook Ads Manager. Select the campaigns, ad sets, or ads you want to report on. Click the Reports dropdown and select Export Table Data.... Before exporting, make sure to use the Columns dropdown to add all the metrics and dimensions you'll need. Export it as a .csv file.

Step 2: Import the CSV into Google Sheets

Open a new Google Sheet. Go to File >, Import >, Upload and select the CSV file you just downloaded. Make sure the data is clean - delete any summary rows or unnecessary text that Facebook adds to the export so you're left with just headers and rows of data.

Step 3: Connect Google Sheets to Looker Studio

Go back to Looker Studio and create a new data source. This time, select the official Google Sheets connector from the list. Find the spreadsheet you just created, select the correct worksheet, and make sure the option "Use first row as headers" is checked.

Looker Studio will attempt to automatically identify the data type for each column (e.g., Number, Text, Date). Double-check these. It’s not uncommon for it to get a date or currency field wrong, so you can manually re-assign the correct type here. Once it looks good, click Connect.

Step 4: Build Your Report

Just like with the other method, you can now click Create Report and start dragging and dropping your fields onto the canvas to create visuals. But remember this data is static. If you want to see tomorrow's numbers, you have to do this all over again.

The Major Downsides of the Manual Method

While free is tempting, this process comes with steep hidden costs:

• It's Entirely Manual: Any time you want updated data, you have to repeat the full export-and-import process. Daily reporting is out of the question, and even weekly reports become a tedious chore.
• It's Fragile and Error-Prone: If Facebook ever changes the order of its columns in an export, or if you accidentally select a different set of columns next time, your entire Looker Studio dashboard will break.
• It's Limited: You are limited to the breakdown reports readily available to export from the Ads Manager interface. Many advanced dimensions and metrics available via the API (and partner connectors) are much harder or impossible to get.

Final Thoughts

Connecting your Facebook and Looker Studio accounts transforms how you analyze and present your social media performance. It moves you from isolated data points in Ads Manager to a complete, integrated view of your marketing impact. While the manual Google Sheets approach can work in a pinch for simple, one-off needs, using a dedicated third-party connector is the only truly sustainable and scalable solution for ongoing, automated reporting.

Of course, getting a handle on your analytics is one piece of the puzzle, the other is streamlining the content creation and community management that actually drive those numbers. At Postbase, we built our analytics right into a clean, modern social media management tool, providing insights that actually help you create better content. It’s our take that you shouldn't have to upgrade to a premium plan just to export a report, which is why we include it from day one, letting you track performance across all your platforms in one simple dashboard.