Website analytics are a vital tool to help you understand what content your customers are engaged with, and what sources drive the most visitors to your site. This kind of insight can help you to make informed decisions about your website and which marketing campaigns to invest in. Similarly, if you have chosen to promote your business on Facebook, their Insights tool gives you data on how well your business page resonates with your audience. In this post we explore what data is available to you via Facebook Insights and what it means.
First, let’s take a step back. There are many ways a business can promote themselves using Facebook, whether it be by creating a Facebook business page, creating advertising campaigns, or both. Facebook Insights give you data on user interaction of your business page as a whole and on individual posts.
Any user set as a Page Admin will have access to Facebook Insights. You can access this by clicking on “See Insights” on the top of your Facebook Business page admin panel.
The first page you will land on is the Overview dashboard. This will show you the key data about your page for the last 7 days, including:
- Page Likes – The total number of “Likes” your business page has, the number of new “Likes” your page has received within a set time period, and how your Likes have increased week-over-week.
- Post Reach – The total reach of your page’s posts, and how your reach has changed week-over-week.
- Engagement – The number of people that have engaged with your page’s posts this week compared to the previous week, as well as the number of Post Likes, Comments, Shares and Clicks.
Beneath your Overview Dashboard, you are given the capability to view your last 5 page posts and their key metrics. You’ll be able to see what type of post it was (whether it be a link, photo or status), its target audience, Reach and Engagement. You also have the option to “Boost” any of your posts, where you can pay a fee to expand your reach a wider audience. If you are already using Facebook ads, this section will show how much you have spent promoting the post.
From the Overview dashboard you can drill down into various areas by using the top navigation to select the area you are interested in.
Likes
The Likes section will show you how your Facebook Business Page has grown over time while drilling down into more detail about how and where this has happened.
Looking at your Total Page Likes will allow you to see how your page has grown over a specified time period. It also allows you to view the number and percentage of Likes obtained on a specified day and the source of those Likes, whether it be directly from your page or via page suggestions. This data could be used to measure the success of an ad campaign. For example, if you are running a campaign for 1 week in order to increase the number of Likes on your Facebook business page, you can compare the number of Likes you received during this period to the average number of Likes you would receive in a given week when the campaign is not running.
Additionally, you can also find out if the Likes your page has received were Organic or Paid Likes, meaning whether they happened naturally or if they are as a result of paid advertising via Facebook Ads. Net Likes data also allows you to see how many people have liked and unliked your page within a given time frame, giving you what is known as the number of “net likes”.
Net Likes = Likes – Unlikes
The last set of Like data looks at where your page’s Likes come from, breaking them down by where they happened, whether they occurred on the actual Business Page itself, from a Page Suggestion or another location.
We have much more information about what your Facebook Insights are telling you. Keep your eyes peeled for part two where we will let you know about more Facebook analytics such as the reach of your posts, your page visitors and more!