How to Use Facebook Analytics

For businesses, Facebook is not just about maintaining social connections. If leveraged correctly, this wildly popular social media platform is also a crucial marketing tool. It lets businesses reach out to their target demographic and get valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences and ideas for engaging prospects in a way that offers value.

These results depend on getting the kind of data you can transform into actionable initiatives that drive the business forward.

Let’s take a look.

What is Facebook Analytics? The basics...

The Facebook platform offers a variety of data for your business page, which can help you find useful patterns that can be applied to insight and action as part of your overall social media marketing strategy. The primary method is through 'Facebook Page Insights', which allows users to measure the engagement and effectiveness of their Facebook pages and marketing efforts.

The original version of Facebook Analytics no longer exists—it was retired in 2021. As Meta now owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, the tech colossus has launched a new set of analytics tools for tracking success and discovering key social insights.

Read: 'Facebook: Shaping the Digital Future' for a deeper dive into Meta’s reimagining of the platform.

What’s replaced traditional Facebook Analytics?

Traditional Facebook Analytics is being replaced by a new breed of analytical tools designed to consolidate business tools, creating a centralized data-driven eco-system in the process.

As part of this initiative, the Insights sections of Instagram profiles and Facebook Pages are still available. Meta Business Suite: a tool that allows you to analyze and manage your Facebook and Instagram business accounts from one central dashboard. Here you can discover comprehensive insights about your audience, content, and any emerging trend or patterns.

Read: 'How Do Social Media Algorithms Work?' for insider tips on maximizing your marketing efforts across some of the world’s most popular platforms.

What is Facebook analytics used for? Tips & pointers

At its core, the new breed of ‘Facebook Analytics’ tools is used for gathering intelligence on your various social media-based activities.

From paid advertising to organic content, cross-channel campaigns, and beyond, Facebook Analytics is designed to uncover a wealth of insights that will help you earn the best possible return on investment (ROI) from your social media strategy.

Tracking the right Facebook Metrics is essential to success

Despite traditional Facebook Analytics being a thing of the past, there are still many ways you can gain insights from the platform’s data-driven tools. Here are the key platforms you should use to squeeze the most juice from your Facebook marketing activities.

• Facebook Page Insights: This lets you measure key campaign metrics including Engagement, Reach, Impressions, and Page Views, Fans’ Reach, and Best Posting Times, and preferred Post Types.
• Facebook Audience Insights: By levering the platform’s in-built audience insights, you can gather key demographic data that will help you make your messaging more personable, targeted, and engaging to specific segments of your fanbase. These metrics include Age & Gender, and Geographical Location.
• Facebook Video Analytics: Video content is one of the most engaging forms of content in the modern age of social media—especially when you consider that TikTok now has a cross-generational appeal (here's a guide on how to market on TikTok). To monitor the ongoing impact of your most dynamic visual content, you can use Facebook Video Analytics using metrics like Video Engagement, Audience Retention, Video Views, and Video Reach.
• Facebook Ad Analytics: Paid advertising is a key part of any solid Facebook marketing strategy. To gain the level of insight you need to optimize your sponsored Facebook content, you can leverage ad analytics insights including Click-Through Rate (CTR), Cost-per-Click (CPC), and Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM).
• Facebook Group Insights: To gain a panoramic idea of your audience growth and understand how willing people are to interact with your brand on the platform, look at Group Insights such as Top Contributors (your most loyal and engaged customers) and New Members (a solid gauge of how many people are joining your brand’s associated Groups on a monthly basis) is a good idea.

Read: 'How to Develop a Social Media Strategy That Drives Brand Awareness & ROI' for essential marketing tips, advice, and guidance.

Alternatives to Facebook Analytics

In addition to Meta’s native analytical tools, here are some other platforms you should consider to gain access to the entire informational pie:

• Sotrender
• Unmetric
• Emplifi
• Keyhole
• SocialPilot
• Quintly
• Rival IQ
• Brandwatch
• Iconosquare
• Socialinsider
• AgoraPulse
• Buffer
• SproutSocial

Negative Data can reveal hidden insight

While it may not be ideal, the negative things brought up in Facebook analytics can be just as—if not more—important than looking at the positives. User actions such as unclicking the “Like” button or choosing to “Hide Posts” or “Report as Spam” are negatives you should not ignore.

If these figures continue to rise, you should be looking at the analytics that tell you how, when, and where negative actions are happening, in an attempt to understand why it is happening. If you don’t know why negative actions are occurring, you are helpless to stop them from continuing.

In some cases, it’s important to keep track of negative data as a way to ensure that users are seeing your posts. The decline may not be your fault, but it might be due to an unanticipated change when Facebook implements a new algorithm.

Facebook analytics - wrap-up

For certain types of digital marketing, Facebook can be an integral channel used to reach out to the desired audience. However, the effectiveness of that marketing increases for businesses that take advantage of the rich analytics provided by tools like Facebook Insights and its alternatives.

DMI's flexible and industry-recognized social media marketing course will help you get ahead of the pack and learn how to leverage social media analytics to your brand-boosting advantage. Enroll today to understand how to use Facebook insights to drive engagement and conversions.

Become a Facebook Pro today!

Related

• How can I create a Facebook Business page?
• The Beginner’s Guide to Advertising on Facebook
• Walkthrough: Facebook Ads & Insights with Cathal Melinn
• What Digital Marketing Skills Do You Need for Web 3.0 and The Metaverse?
• The Best Social Media Metrics To Focus On In Your Campaigns