Facebook is still the go-to Social Media platform. When starting to promote your business, service or product.
It allows you to create a page for your business and send people to your website.
So, you have your business website up and running.
It looks great and is working well for you.
It’s very easy for new customers to buy from you and get in touch. But, instead of the sounds of a cash register, you are hearing crickets.
It doesn’t matter what product or service you sell, you need customers.
You need a way to promote your business and gain the attention of potential clients. Facebook pages are amazing at helping businesses of any size reach more customers.
If you’re struggling to get your head around the use of analytics in marketing.
Or want to find out more about data-driven marketing. We’ve put together an amazing guide to get you started: What Is Marketing Analytics and Data-Driven Marketing?
Facebook Page Insights – Reaching Your Audience
You have created your Facebook page.
And spent some time making sure it looks and operates like a sister page of your main website.
It is an amazing way to reach new customers. Making sense of the Insights section of your Facebook page metrics may not be as rewarding.
For years, I’ve used Facebook page insights to see how well we are marketing our products and services.
As the Goliath of social media. It continues to grow and keeps adding new features to its page offering.
Facebook has the ability to track almost any type of interaction. Over 50,000 on anyone one person. That said the core insights that you should look at aren’t going to change anytime soon.
Once you have started building up a fan base and are getting consistent traffic to your website.
You need to keep the momentum going. And you can’t afford to spend too much time looking into how people have interacted with each post.
This is where Elementary Analytics comes in.
Start by focusing on a few key insights. These metrics help you see how your Facebook page posts and campaigns are increasing your page followers. In turn, this drives traffic to your website.
Top 5 Facebook Page Metrics To Track
Your page is up and running and you set up your ‘calls to action’.
You’ve created a brief social media marketing plan. And you begin creating content and sharing posts on the page on a regular basis.
“How do I know if my marketing plan is working?”
As I’ve mentioned. I have used Facebook pages to promote many things over the years.
I was involved in an app-based start-up a good few years ago. We used our Facebook pages’ main button to try and get new app installs. As well as posting regular content to engage people and drive traffic to the app’s marketing website.
Here are the 5 stats I looked at when reviewing Facebook page metrics.
As long as the numbers were going in an upward direction. For the first few months at least, I was happy.
Page Views
This may seem like a no-brainer.
“Of course, I want to know how many views my Facebook page is getting”.
It isn’t as straightforward as that.
If you are creating engaging content and people are coming to your page. Of course, that is fantastic. But, you need to make sure that these page views are helping you reach your goals.
For example, if you use the ‘Shop’ functionality within a Facebook page. And are seeing a high number of people visiting your page. But no one is clicking through to buy your product you may need to investigate why.
Going back to the app start-up.
I used to track that if we had a high number of page views over a 7-day period.
Was this impacting the number of new people that downloaded and installed or app? Or did it mean people liked our content and wanted to follow us and view more of our posts?
Impressions
Impressions relate to how many people see a post from your page in their news feed.
It doesn’t matter if they interacted with your post or scrolled past it.
Each time this happens, it’s counted as an impression.
I find this insight interesting. Because you can see how your content is performing by reviewing this stat.
The way that Facebook has changed how their ‘algorithm’ works over the past few years. They seem to reward you for making engaging content.
The more people that like, share and interact with a single post the better. Facebook will ‘reward’ you by displaying future posts to more and more people.
If you keep producing excellent and engaging content. Your impressions number should increase over time.
So, impressions are a quick way to see if your content/marketing plan or strategy is working.
WARNING: Not all engagement is equal.
Within our app start-up we shared new blog posts or articles on Facebook.
Sometimes we would get a high spike in traffic to our site. We had a lot of followers who would click our links on a regular basis.
What we found was that if people left Facebook and visited our site without sharing or liking the post. Our impression numbers began to drop.
We weren’t ‘rewarded’ for the click. Even though a high number of people engaged with our posts.
This isn’t something to be that worried about.
But, factor this in when building your content creation plan.
Likes
People say Facebook page likes are a vanity metric.
I get where people are coming from. But I don’t agree with this.
It depends on how your Facebook page sits inside your marketing/business plan.
I know of some people who use the number of likes and follows on their page to sell ‘posts’ to other businesses. Using their page to promote other people’s businesses.
For a fee of course.
Could this be the reason it’s labelled a vanity metric?
If you are using a Facebook page to promote you and your business. Page likes are a good insight to follow. If someone likes your page it means they want to hear from you again.
This is something Seth Godin calls Permission Marketing. And it’s great for building your business.
Alongside impressions. If the number of likes for your page is going up.
Then people find your content engaging and are willing to see posts from you in the future.
This doesn’t mean you need to sell to them.
An 80/20 split of 80% content that entertains or informs and 20% of content promoting your business. Is a great way to plan what posts you should share in a given week.
Page Engagement
This metric shows if people have visited your page and if they have performed an action.
An action could be clicking the ‘visit website’ button on the top of your page. It could be some watching a video. Or clicking on a product in your shop section.
It’s how they are interacting with your page.
This metric is another way to see if your page is set up for interactions.
Again, if this number is rising on a constant basis you know that your content and page is doing well. If not then you may need to review your page.
Post Engagement
Like page engagement, this metric shows you if people have interacted with your posts.
Using this metric alongside impressions. Is a great way to keep track of how your content strategy is performing.
If you have a high number of impressions and a high number of post engagement. It could mean you are doing something right.
As I’ve discussed. A high number of post engagements should increase your impressions for your next post(s).
Let’s say you have a week of low post-engagement.
This could impact the number of impressions that your posts get over the next week or so.
Using these two stats together is a great way to review if your strategy and marketing plan is working.
Viewing Your Top 5 Facebook Page Metrics
It’s a pain viewing your Facebook Page metrics using Meta’s Insights Analytics dashboard.
Even more so, if, like me, you have a couple of pages that you want to keep an eye on.
To see what the growth is like in the early stages of promotion.
This was one of the reasons I started building Elementary Analytics. I wanted a cut-down and very specific view of my Facebook insight stats.
At the time I was reviewing Facebook page metrics for the app start-up. And a page promoting a small t-shirt business.
“Elementary” Or Simplified View Of Your Facebook Page Insights
With our dashboard, you can view your top 5 metrics on a single widget.
Create as many widgets as you need for the Facebook page metrics you would like to review.
Below is a screenshot of the last 30 days’ stats for Elementary Analytics.
The widget gives a total of 4 metrics over the past thirty days.
These metrics are likes, views, engagement and post clicks.
We also indicate if a specific metric has increased or decreased compared to the previous thirty days.
A graph breaks down the 5 key Facebook page metrics by day.
There is also a more detailed view if you click the ‘View detailed breakdown’ link within the widget.
The graph displayed is the same as the previous screen.
This breakdown shows you data for not only the last thirty days. But stats for the last seven days this month, last month and the last ninety days. As well as a 12-month run rate.
So you can see how your Facebook page is growing in the early days of your website. Even long-term.
We even show you your best-performing posts for the last 30 days too.
There you have it.
Our guide to the Top 5 Facebook Page metrics to track when starting out marketing your business using a Facebook page.
I would love to hear your thoughts on which metrics to track and if you found this post useful.
Regards, Phil.
P.S. Thanks for reading.
