If your business uses Facebook, the platform’s built-in analytics dashboard is a powerful resource for viewing metrics, discovering your audience’s demographics, and seeing how you rank with competitors.
Understanding your Facebook analytics is crucial to growing your page, understanding your audience, and determining the success of your content strategy. Here’s how to navigate your business’s Facebook metrics and turn them into actionable strategies.
Where to find Facebook Insights
To find Facebook Insights, start on the homepage of your news feed. Look at the sidebar on the left-hand side and scroll through until you find Pages. After clicking on this, you’ll be taken to your list of active business pages. Click on the page you want to view insights for — once you’re there, you can find Insights by scrolling through the sidebar on the left-hand side.
Using Insights, you can browse an overview page that features your metrics summary for the past seven days. Options for key metrics for today, yesterday, or the past 28 days are also available.
Facebook Page Insights vs. Facebook Audience Insights
Facebook Page Insights, which focuses on your business’s page, offers very different functions than Facebook Audience Insights. Using likes, comments, and shares on your page, Facebook Insights gives entrepreneurs a firmer understanding of who is interacting with their page.
By using Page Insights, entrepreneurs can track their page’s performance, observe how they stack up to their competitors, learn about visitor behaviors, and understand their content’s engagement history. These analytics help business owners determine what times of day their audiences are most active, what posts are most engaged with, and how their audiences are responding.
Facebook Audience Insights, on the other hand, is geared toward marketers who are creating ad campaigns and targeting new customers. These insights focus on Facebook audiences across the entire platform, aggregating anonymous information such as user demographics, page likes, and purchase activity to find a wider range of potential customers.
[Read more: A Quick Guide to Marketing Your Business on Facebook]
Top Facebook analytics to track
Out of all the social media networks, Facebook probably gives you the most data and insights about your audience. But this data is only useful if you understand what it means. Let’s look at the top stats you’ll want to track on your Facebook business page.
Impressions
Your impressions are the total number of times people saw your Facebook post. And a new impression will be counted even if your post was seen multiple times by the same user.
Impressions aren’t a reliable measure of engagement, but they can help you gauge how viral your content is. And seeing your posts multiple times will encourage Facebook users to take action.
To track all of your analytics, you’ll go to your Facebook business page and click on the Insights tab on the left. You’ll see an overview of your stats as well as a breakdown of your reach, page views, and more.
Reach
Reach measures the number of times a new user sees your content, whether organic or through paid advertising. It’s an excellent way to track how many people are viewing your content over time.
And as your reach increases, Facebook will begin pushing your content out to more people. You can find this information by clicking “Reach” in the Insights tab on your Facebook page.
Engagement
When someone engages with your post, it means they saw it and then took action. This could be liking it, leaving a comment, clicking on a link, or sharing the post. Engagement shows that not only are people seeing your content, but they also want to engage with your page.
You can also monitor negative engagement on your page. This is when someone hides your post, unlikes your page, or reports a post as spam. Negative engagement is important to track because it can decrease the number of people you reach.
[Read more: Facebook Marketplace Holds New Opportunities for Businesses]
Page followers
Your page followers are your business’s biggest fans and the ones who engage with your content the most. When someone follows your page, they agree to have your posts show up in their news feed.
It’s a good idea to track how your number of page followers is changing over time. For instance, if you’ve lost a substantial number of followers over the past year, you’ll want to rethink your marketing strategy.
But if your business is consistently gaining new followers, this is a sign that your audience is growing, and you’re gaining more traction.
Facebook metrics indicate whether your content is effective at reaching your target audience, or if you need to restrategize to create more compelling content.
Video performance
If you click on the Videos tab, you can monitor how well your videos perform with your audience.
You can track how many people are watching your videos, as well as how engaged they are. You’ll also see how many unique or repeat views you received on your videos and whether the video autoplayed or users clicked on it to play.
Another useful analytics tool is that Facebook shows you your five top-performing videos. These are videos that were viewed for three seconds or more and received the most engagement.
Seeing which video content performs best with your audience can help you plan your content strategy in the future.
Pages to watch
If you scroll to the bottom of your analytics overview, you’ll see a section called pages to watch. This section will compare your page to your five biggest competitors and see how your page matches up.
You’ll see a quick comparison based on total page likes, new posts, and overall engagement. If you click on any of the pages, you’ll see their top posts from that week. This can be a good way to monitor the types of content performing well in your industry.
Local
And finally, if you run a local business, you’ll want to take advantage of the Local tab in your analytics. This tab gives you information about customers in your area and demographics of your customers.
Best of all, if you run Facebook ads, you can see the percentage of local customers who viewed your ads. All of this information can help you increase your business’s presence in your community.
[Read more: 5 Tips for a Killer Small Business Facebook Strategy]
How to use Facebook metrics
Clearly define and update your target audience
Facebook metrics indicate whether your content is effective at reaching your target audience, or if you need to restrategize to create more compelling content.
Using Facebook metrics to look at who is interacting with your page, you can clearly define your audience and retain those users who are already engaged. Having a better understanding of your intended audience will help you develop content that is tailored to them — helping you grow both your page and your business.
Identify common themes and preferences
Businesses can determine the type of content that is most well-received and successful by viewing their Facebook metrics. Taking a look at factors like page engagement history, audience behaviors, and the time frames in which content receives the most attention, business owners can develop new content geared toward a more focused audience.
Identify issues and turnoffs in content
Entrepreneurs can use Facebook analytics to determine which kind of content is the least successful with their audience, allowing them to avoid wasting resources on less-than-impactful content. If there is a pattern of content that is seeing poor engagement or being negatively received, viewing Facebook metrics — such as seeing if people report your posts as spam or hide them — can help to pinpoint the problem before it impacts your reach.
Make your posts actionable
Each post you create should be designed with a specific goal in mind. To create an effective ad that moves your audience forward toward that goal, incorporate action buttons into ads. Doing so will make it easier for your audience to follow through with the next steps, further interacting with your posts and possibly leading to an increase in revenue.
Optimize your post targeting
Page Insights allows you to access analytics about your audience to find new ways of keeping them engaged in your content. These insights can be used to learn about your audience’s preferences such as their interests and page likes, as well as helpful demographic information, such as location, age, gender identity, and ethnicity, which can be used to create targeted content that’s more suited to your current audience.
[Read more: How to Monetize Facebook and Increase Your Social Media Revenue]
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