AnalyticsAn Introduction to Facebook’s New Page Insights

An Introduction to Facebook's New Page Insights

Facebook Page Insights is where page managers go to get key page performance metrics. There's a lot of data just waiting to be uncovered in the newest version of Facebook's analytics. Get familiar with the metrics you can track in this guide.

Facebook has officially rolled out its new Page Insights analytics. While some page managers may have already been experimenting with the data as an early adopter, for many, it’s a brand new look. So let’s quickly go over what you can find in the new analytics, which Facebook promises to bring better insight in a more simple-to-understand manner.

First, Facebook explained the major changes of its analytics in an announcement:

To help Page admins better see how people interact with their content, we split the People Talking About This (PTAT) metric into separate elements: Page Likes, People Engaged (the number of unique people who have clicked on, liked, commented on, or shared your posts), Page tags and mentions, Page checkins and other interactions on a Page.

And it also explained what’s staying the same:

All APIs associated with the old Page Insights will remain available to Page owners and developers; any future changes to these APIs will be announced in accordance with our Developer policies. We’ll also work to add APIs for new Page Insights metrics as they become available, so Page owners and Developers can track key metrics more easily.

It’s also important to note that there are no immediate plans to change People Talking About This (PTAT) as a public-facing metric on Pages; PTAT is still available via the old exports and API.

When you first land in your analytics, you’ll notice the look has changed. There are six separate tabs to analyze the metrics that matter, starting with the “Overview” tab, where you’ll get a snapshot of what’s been happening in your Facebook account over the past seven days, and you can drill down from there.

facebook- insights-overview-tab

The next tab to the right is the “Likes” tab, where you can see data about the likes your brand is receiving. One common theme in the new Insights is the ability to drill down into data more than ever before.

One example of the data you can access is what day garnered how many likes, and where those likes came from by moving your mouse over the graph. You can also select the options to the right of the graph to hone in.

likes-tab-facebook-insights

The “Reach” tab comprises metrics that factor into Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, including likes, comments and shares of posts. You can delve into a specific period of time by using the calendar selector, or by clicking and dragging your mouse across the graph.

reach-tab-facebook-insights

Dates you select will present a pop-up window that will show you the posts within that timeframe and their engagement level (note the “virality” metric you might be used to seeing is now called “engagement,” and additionally includes clicks as part of its measurement).

The engagement rate is the percentage of unique people who clicked on, liked, commented on, or shared a post divided by the total number of unique people who saw the post.

reach-metric-facebook-insights

The “Visits” tab shows you where people came from (referring traffic), and what tabs within your page they interacted with while there. It also shows things like how many times your page was mentioned within a defined period of time you choose.

visits-tab-facebook-insights

In the “Posts” tab, you can get a better understanding of your content’s performance. The “When Your Fans Are Online” tab shows you when your fans are on Facebook, adjusted to your local time zone.

when-fans-are-online-facebook-insights

On the tab to the right of that, “Post Types” shows you what types of posts are reaching and engaging the most people, for example, status updates, photos, or links.

post-types-facebook-insights

You can sort the table data in several ways by selecting the drop-down menu, as well as clicking on the “Reach” or “Engagement” table heading.

sort-table-data-facebook-insights

If you see a post you want to learn more about, simply click on the link to the post. Facebook aggregates a bunch of information about the performance of a particular update and presents that in a pop-up window.

post-details-facebook-insights

The “People” tab not only gives you insight about your page’s fans, but also your fan demographics compared to the general population of Facebook. So we can see here that this page has an audience that is primarily male, and of that male audience, 31 percent is age 25 to 34.

fan-demographics-facebook-insights

But don’t forget about the fans that are actually engaged, which can be a more telling indicator than just those who have liked the page at one point or another. You can access this this information under the “People Engaged” tab.

people-engaged-facebook-insights

This high-level introduction is merely scratching the surface of what you can do in Facebook Insights. There’s a lot more data just waiting to be uncovered in the newest version of this social network’s analytics.

My advice? Go in there, start playing around and applying what you’ve learned to see if it moves your metrics in a positive way. Happy mining!

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