Everyone is talking about the newer social media platforms, like TikTok, and Twitch. The granddaddy, Facebook never even gets mentioned. But it still dominates the social media marketing landscape.
I love a good stat, as of writing this post, well over 2.8 BILLION people use Facebook every day, that’s insane.
There are many ways to promote yourself or your business using Facebook. From running ads campaigns to setting up a group to build a community.
Tracking your Facebook metrics is an easy way to keep up with the performance of a business’s social media presence. It can help you attract potential customers as well.
Here you will find the 10 most important Facebook metrics you should be tracking in 2022.
Top 10 Facebook metrics to track in 2022
1. Impressions
If you want to know how many times a piece of content that you published has been seen. Then you want to look at the impressions metric.
Here’s what Facebook says an impression is
“A common metric used by the online marketing industry, and represents the number of times your ads/posts were on screen.”
Tracking this metric can be easy using an analytics tool like Elementary Analytics.
To find this metric in your Facebook page insights, follow these steps.
- Go to your Facebook page
- Find the “Page Insights” button on the “Manage page” side bar.
- Access the “Posts” button on the left side bar on your screen
- Finally, go to “Reach: Organic/Paid” and change it to “Impressions: Organic/Paid”
So what does “Organic” and “Paid” mean
Organic
This Facebook metric shows how many people have seen your post in their news feed, for free.
Paid
This Facebook metric shows you the number of times people have viewed content that you have paid for it to be displayed somewhere.
TOP TIP
Always compare impressions stats to previous days, weeks, or months to see if you can spot trends. Elementary Analytics does this for you, making it easier to see performance over a month or a quarter.
2. Reach
Reach is defined as the total number of unique Facebook users that have seen your ad or content.
When you use this key Facebook metric, it will show how your content echoes to the audience and can help improve any marketing strategy based on those findings.
Measuring your page’s reach is an important part of marketing. With social media analytics tools, like Elementary Analytics. You can get more comprehensive information than if this were done through native apps like Facebook or Instagram.
You can also access your reach data in Facebook Insights:
- Go to your Facebook page
- Find the “Page Insights” button from your “Manage page” side bar
- Access the “Reach” button located on the left side bar of the screen
The reach stat is broken down into two categories, organic and paid, just like the impressions metric.
3. Video Engagement
Facebook loves video content. So do marketers.
If you’re using videos to promote your business, then you need to make sure you’re tracking the engagement.
Video engagement isn’t a single metric on its own. It’s calculated on the number of likes, comments shared, and clicks that videos are getting.
Some of Facebook’s Insight metrics aren’t the best, but they have done a good job and breaking down video engagement stats, so you can make sense of what’s going on. These metrics are split into two categories, overall performance, and individual video metrics.
Overall Performance
- Go to “Page Insights”
- Click on “Posts”
- Clicking on “Posts types”
You’ll see a list with all of your posts (photos or videos) and their average engagement like in the picture below.
Best Performing Videos
This allows you to see the best performing video posts on your page for a date range that you can specify
- Go to “Page Insights”
- Click on “Videos”
- Select the time range needed
You’ll be able to see the total number of minutes that your videos were played for. As well as the number of times that your videos were played for at least three seconds.
Individual Video Metrics
- Go to “Page Insights”
- Click on “Videos”
- Scroll down to “Top Videos”
- Click on the post title of one of your videos
TOP TIP
If you are using a lot of video content to promote your business. Vertical videos have a better performance than landscape videos, so keep that in mind.
4. Video Retention
Here’s Facebook’s official stance on video retention
“The amount of time viewers spend watching the videos you publish to your Page”
This Facebook metric tells you how long a video keeps a viewer’s attention.
Key metrics like video engagement and retention help you better understand how long people are watching your videos, at what point they tend to stop watching them.
There are two ways to keep an eye on this metric
Facebook Page Insights
- Go to “Page Insights”
- Click on “Videos”
- Scroll down to “Top Videos”
- Click on the post title of one of your videos
- Select “Post Overview” to see your viewers’ activity and other video metrics
- Select “Retention” for more in-depth video retention insights
Facebook Creator Studio
- Go to the “Insights” tab in the left side bar
- Scroll down and spot the “Videos” tab
- Click on “Retention” to see more in-depth video retention insights
5. Engagement Rate
The Facebook engagement rate is an important factor in determining how successful your post was. This number represents the average amount of people who interacted with it by liking, sharing, or clicking on one thing you posted online for example – this could be anything from a picture to some kind words about their day!
To calculate the engagement rate. Take your total engagement number, divide it by the total followers your page has, then multiple it by 100.
One of the toughest challenges when building your Facebook page is getting consistent engagement. In fact, that’s true across all social media platforms.
To help determine post engagement, you can calculate the average engagement rate per post by followers (a mouthful I know). Start by totaling up the likes and comments, then divide this number of the total number of posts. Then divide this number again by the number of followers your page has. Finally multiple the resulting number by 100.
6. Follower Growth
Now, some people say this is a vanity metric. I can see how people view this metric that way. For me, it’s a key metric to track. If someone follows your page, then they are saying that they want to see what content you are putting out there. Now that is not something that should be ignored.
Not only do you want to track if you’re getting new followers. But, you also want to see if you are losing followers over a period of time.
It could be that your content strategy isn’t working as well as it used to be and people aren’t engaged. You need to constantly review follower count and the underlying trends as a way to know that your marketing plan is working.
7. Click Through Rate
There are many Facebook metrics to measure, but one that stands out is Click-Through Rate. This tells you how many people who saw your content actually clicked through and visited your website!
To find out the CTR of a post: divide the number of link clicks by the reach, and multiply by 100.
8. Cost Per Conversion
When all is said and done, how much did it cost to get that conversion? Take all the costs of the social media campaign and divide it by the number of conversions you got.
If you spend $1,000 and get two conversions, your CPC is $500. If your profit is $300, you have some work to do.
9. Cost Per Thousand Impressions
Cost per thousand impressions, or ‘CPM’ as it’s more commonly known. Is the amount you pay every time a thousand people scroll past your sponsored social media post.
10. Followers Demographics
Understanding your audience will help you understand the type of content they want and need. It’s important that we tailor your message with them in mind so it resonates well!
You can do this by looking at the follower demographics such as gender, location (country or even city), and education.
Having this in mind, you can create your Facebook strategy to attract people similar to your current followers and to create content they can relate to.
However, it’s important to put your own demographic first.
If your demographic consists of people over 25, or even over 30, keep the bulk of your content curated for that specific age group, while also including some posts meant to attract the younger segment.
Conclusion
Knowing your target audience is the first step in developing your social media marketing strategy. But this is not enough. Creating valuable content also needs consistent monitoring.
All these metrics can be tracked manually, but if you want to save time and energy, you can use an analytics tool, like Elementary Analytics.
It’s up to you to decide which Facebook metrics are important for your business.
