Open navigation

Facebook Public Data report building guide

With the Facebook Public Data data source, you can see how your public Facebook Pages are growing and do competitor benchmarking. Use this data with Facebook Insight and Facebook Ads data to get full visibility of your Facebook presence.


For a full list of metrics and dimensions available in our Facebook Public Data data source connector, take a look at our Facebook Public Data documentation.


Once you’ve connected to Facebook Public Data, you’re ready to create your first query in Google Sheets, Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio), or Excel.


Query types for this data source

When connecting to the Facebook Public Data data source, you need to select a query type. The query type defines what sort of metrics and dimensions are available.

  • Facebook page: Page data, including Likes, About, and the website link.
  • Facebook page posts: Information on posts made to the Page, such as Post link, Reaction counts, and Comment counts.
  • Facebook shares for URLs: Data about specific shared URLs, like URL, Share count, and Comment count.

Note that if you need to use multiple query types in your Looker Studio report, you'll need to create separate connectors for each query type you use.


Try these queries

See the following use cases for examples of how to set up queries.


See likes, comments, reactions, and shares of your posts

Explore what sort of content has caught your audiences’ attention. As a benchmark, you can of course run this same query for a competitor’s Facebook Page. We’ll take a look at this data for the past 7 days. 


Use the “Facebook Page posts” query type. 


The “Likes per posts” metric shows the count likes per post. 

The “Comments per post” metric shows the count of comments on the post. 

The “Reactions per post” metric shows the count of reactions per post. 

The “Shares per post” metric shows the count of shares per post.


For best results in Looker Studio, use the table chart type.

  1. Set the date range to Last 7 days.
  2. Select the Likes per post, Comments per post, Reactions per post, and Shares per post metrics.
  3. Select the Created date, Link to post, Picture, Message, Post link, and Caption dimensions to fetch the date the post was created, link to the post, and details about the post content. 


See detailed reactions to your posts

Take a closer look at how your audience has reacted to your posts. 


Use the “Facebook Page posts” query type. 


The “Likes” metric shows the total count of post likes. 

The “Likes” metric also includes the Care reaction. 

The “Reactions: Love”, “Reactions: Wow”, “Reactions: Haha”, “Reactions: Sad”, and “Reactions: Angry” metrics show the total number of said reactions. 

The "Reactions" metric shows the total count of reactions to the post. 


For best results in Looker Studio, use the table chart type.

  1. Set the date range to Last 28 days
  2. Select the Likes, Reactions: Love, Reactions: Haha, Reactions: Wow, Reactions: Sad, Reactions: Angry, and Reactions metrics. 
  3. Select the Created date and Link to post dimensions to fetch the date the posts were published and links to them.


See your Page compared to your competitors

Explore how your competitors describe themselves on Facebook, and how many likes and followers they attract. See how many people are talking about them.


Use the “Facebook Page” query type.


The “Likes” metric shows the number of users who like the Page. For global Pages, this is the count for all Pages across the brand.

The “Page followers" metric shows the number of Page followers.

The “Talking about” metric shows the number of people talking about the Page.

The “Checkins” metric shows the number of checkins at a place represented by the Page.


For best results in Looker Studio, use the table chart type.

  1. Set the date range to Last 28 days
  2. Select the Likes, Page followers, Talking about, and Checkins metrics. 
  3. Select the Name (Profile), Link to page, Category, and About dimensions to fetch data about the Pages. 


See number of comments, reactions, and shares for URLs 

Explore specific URLs on Facebook. Take a look at how the URLs are shared, and how people comment and react to them.


Use the “Facebook shares for URLs” query type. Check the Allow "Type URLs" to be modified in reports checkbox, if you want to add more URLs while setting up the query.


The “Comments” metric shows the URL comment count.

The “Shares” metric shows the URL share count.

The “Reactions” metric shows the URL reactions count.


For best results in Looker Studio, use the table chart type.

  1. Select the Comments, Shares, and Reactions metrics. 
  2. Select the URL, Description, and Title dimensions to fetch data of the URL, URL description, and URL title.


Set up scheduled refreshes for your reports

You can set up scheduled refreshes for your reports created in Google Sheets and Excel. Follow the instructions on how to create and manage scheduled reports in Google Sheets and how to set up scheduled report triggers in Excel.


In Looker Studio, you can have a copy of your report emailed to you and important stakeholders at regular intervals.


More resources

You might also be interested in:

Did you find it helpful? Yes No

Send feedback
Sorry we couldn't be helpful. Help us improve this article with your feedback.