6 tips on Facebook analytics and going beyond 'reach'
Image by mkhmarketing on Flickr. Creative commons licence.
It’s tempting to look at the large ‘reach’ number displayed on a Facebook post and conclude your post has been successful. In my view, ‘reach’ is an easy-to-see vanity metric and not what you should be focusing on.
It’s much more useful to look at the percentage of people who actually clicked through to your news site or engaged in some other way after the post had reached them.
Facebook Insights provides some handy numbers, but the most useful ones are somewhat hidden.
Here are my 6 tips in using Facebook analytics and a steer on the numbers to focus on.
1. Keep an eye on the new audiences you are reaching
You are probably not paying for ‘reach’ for individual posts. So rather than using the default ‘reach’ divided into ‘organic’ and ‘paid’ within Facebook Insights, select the ‘reach fans / non-fans’ option. This allows you to see which posts are taking your journalism to new audiences by showing up in the news feeds of people who don’t follow your page.
2. Look at engagement as a percentage of reach
The default view within Facebook Insights provides ‘post clicks’ and ‘likes, comments and shares’. A word of warning: ‘post clicks’ is not the number of people clicking through to your news site from the Facebook post, it also includes ‘photo views’ or people who clicked ‘see more’ if some of the intro text was hidden.
Engagement is a key metric you should focus on as if you are reaching a lot of people but they are not engaging, Facebook will gradually reduce the number of times they see your posts.
My advice is to change the drop down to see ‘engagement’ as a percentage of reach and use that as one of the ways of checking on the success of your posts.
By following points 1 and 2, you then have this type of info. (The light orange is fans, the dark orange is the people you have reached who don't follow your page; pink is engagement.)
3. Look at the number of people actually clicking through to your site
I mentioned in point 2 that ‘post clicks’ are not the same as traffic. Unfortunately you cannot see this figure as a column within the overview table within Insights. You can see the ‘link clicks’ if you click on the post within Insights.
It’s useful to calculate the percentage of ‘link clicks’ out of the total ‘reach’. You might be surprised just how low that is, but you can learn from it and discover which type of posts drive the most traffic.
link clicks / reach x 100 = click-through rate
(I’ve been trying to think of a way of creating a tool that could calculate this automatically but can’t see a way of scraping the numbers from the stats preview area of Insights. Ideas greatly received.)
4. Look at the click-through rate more closely
Facebook Insights offers the ability to download post-level data to Excel or as a CSV file.
You’ll get several worksheets.
Where to find the key metrics:
In the ‘key metrics’ sheet you have the ‘post message’ (column C)
Also in ‘key metrics’ you have the the ‘type’ (whether it is a link post / photo post / video) (column D)
In the ‘lifetime post by consumers’ sheet you can find you ‘link clicks’ (column J)
You can then copy and paste those key metrics over to a new sheet, along with any others you want to focus on. You can also add a column to show ‘link clicks’ as a % of ‘reach’ (link clicks/reach*100)
(I usually just copy the ‘post clicks’ over and then create a pivot table based on the data I’m interested in.)
5. Keep an eye on competitors
You can watch other Facebook pages and see how yours compares in terms of engagement. You can also see how many posts another page posted in the past week.
A couple of other pointers on Facebook Page Insights: note the ‘post types’ function and also the ‘top posts from pages you watch’. Both are useful in terms of learning what works for you and elsewhere.
Domain Insights is another Facebook analytics tool for publishers. It shows all referrer traffic to your domain from Facebook (not just the articles you post to your page).
You’ll need to add a line of code to your news website to link the two.
Domain Insights gives really useful information such as:
Your audience by device type (iOS, Android, web, mobile web, unknown)
The most valuable part is ‘top links’. You also get to see which articles on your site Facebook is driving most traffic to. (And you can click on a particular story and see the breakdown by device.) It tells you when that article was last posted to your Facebook page, if at all.
