Facebook is the go to Social Media platform when starting to promote your business, service or product. It allows you to create a unique page to drive traffic to your website.
So, you have your business website up and running. It looks great and works extremely well. It’s very easy for potential customers to buy from you and get in touch. However, instead of the sounds of a cash register, you are hearing crickets.
Regardless of what product or service you are offering you need customers. You need a way to promote your business and gain the attention of potential clients. Facebook pages are the go-to platform to help businesses of any size reach potential customers.
Facebook Page Insights – Reaching Your Audience
You have created a Facebook page and spent some time ensuring it looks and operates like a sister page of your main website. It is an amazing way to reach potential customers. Making sense of the Insights section of your Facebook page may not be as rewarding.
I have spent years looking over Facebook page insights for a variety of products and services. As the Goliath of social media continues to grow and keeps adding new features into its page offering. It seems that new tracking insight information is being added every month. Facebook has the ability to track almost any type of interaction. 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 can’t afford to spend too much time looking into how people have interacted with each post.
This is where Elementary Analytics comes in. You need to focus on the key overarching insights. Helping you see how your Facebook page posts and campaigns are increasing your page followers. In turn, driving traffic to your website.
Top 5 Facebook Page Metrics To Track
Your page is up and running and you have decided on a number of ‘calls to action’. With a brief social media marketing plan, 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 previously mentioned. I have used Facebook pages to promote numerous 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 on posting regular content to engage people and drive traffic to the apps marketing website.
Here are the 5 metrics I looked when reviewing Facebook page insights. As long as the numbers where going in an upwards 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 straight forward as that. If you are creating engaging content and people are coming to your page. Of course that is fantastic. However, you need to make sure that these page view 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 are visiting your page. But no one is click through to purchase your product you may need to investigate why.
Going back to the app start-up. I used to monitor 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 simply mean people liked our content and just wanted to follow us and view more of our posts?
Impressions
Impressions relate to how many people see a posts from your page in their news feed. Regardless of whether they interacted with posts or simply scrolled past it.
This insight is an interesting one for me. I think you can see how your content is performing just by reviewing this stat.
The way that Facebook have 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 steadily increase over time. Therefore, it is a very quick way to see if your content/marketing plan or strategy is working.
WARNING: Not all engagement is created 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. In general we had a lot of followers that 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 interactions even though a high number of people engaged with our posts.
This isn’t something to be overly worried about. You just need to factor this in when building your content creation plan.
Likes
Facebook page likes are deemed in some quarters as a ‘vanity’ metric. I fully understand how people view this insight.
Although I don’t fully agree with this. It all depends on how your Facebook page integrates into your overall marketing/business plan.
I know of some people who use the number of likes and follows that their page has to try and sell ‘posts’ to other businesses. Using their page to promote other peoples businesses. For a fee of course. I think this is why likes are labelled as a vanity metric.
However, if you are genuinely 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 is great for building your business.
Alongside impressions. If the number of likes for your page is going up then people are finding your content engaging and are willing to see posts from you in the future.
This doesn’t mean you need to constantly sell to them. A 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 clicked the ‘visit website’ button on the top of your page. It could be some watching a video. Or clicking on a product on your shop section.
However they are interacting with your page. This metric is another way to see if your page is optimised for interactions.
Again, if this number is rising on a constant basis you know that your content and page is structured well. If not then you may need to review your page.
Post Engagement
This is very similar to page engagement, showing if people have interacted one way or another 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. Amazing you are doing something right. As previously mentioned. A high number of post engagement should increase your impressions for you 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.
Again, using these to stats together is a great way to review if your strategy and marketing plan is working.
Viewing Your Top 5 Facebook Insight Metrics
It can be a pain viewing all these metrics using the Facebook Insights Analytics dashboard. Even more so, if, like me you have a couple of pages that you want to keep an eye. 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 insight information for the app start-up. A page promoting a small t-shirt printing business and a football based forum called Football Social Club.
“Elementary” Or Simplified View Of Your Facebook Page Insights
With our dashboard you can view your top 5 metrics on a single widget. Creating as many widgets as you need for the Facebook pages as you would like to review.
Below is a screenshot of the last 7 days stats for. https://www.footballsocial.club/
The widget gives a total for 4 metrics over the past seven days. These metrics are likes, views, engagement and post clicks.
There is also an indicator highlighting if a specific metric has increased or decreased compared to the previous seven days.
A graph breaks down the 5 key metrics by day. There is also a slightly more detailed view if you click the ‘View more detail’ link within the widget.
The graph displayed is the same as the previous widget. However, our dashboard gives a breakdown for not only the last seven days. But stats for this month, last month and the last ninety days. As well as any KPI’s that has been set.
So you can easily see how your Facebook page is growing in the early days of your website.
There you have it. Elementary Analytics’ guide to the Top 5 Facebook Page metrics to track when you are 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.
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Thanks for reading.
