Facebook Insights: 10 Metrics and Tactics That Matter

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Now that you’ve had time to poke around the new Facebook Insights, it’s time to think about how you can use it to make actionable decisions about your campaigns.

“But, guys,” you say, “there are *so* many data points. I can’t possibly know which ones I should actually care about.” That’s where this white paper comes in.

We’ve come up with 10 ways to use Facebook Insights to optimize campaigns, widen your reach, boost fan engagement and drive results. We’ll also help you determine which campaigns aren’t performing so you can stop wasting resources on tactics that aren’t converting. With these tips, we promise you won’t even miss PTAT. Now let’s do this.

1. Use demographics to develop persona-specific content

You probably have a list of personas you want to target via various marketing initiatives, right? Well each of those personas is going to be more or less prominent on varying channels. Facebook is no different. Look at your demographics data to see which types of people are fans of your Page. You’ll probably find that it skews more heavily in one or two directions rather than a healthy mix of all of your personas. This is actually a good thing, because it means you can focus on developing persona-specific content for your Facebook Page that resonates with your audience there. Once you start posting tailored content, expect to see your engagement rates rise.

“But how do I know if it worked?” Glad you asked. Go back to your individual post performance metrics and see if those numbers started growing after you switched up your content calendar.

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2. Use Page/Tab visits to determine where to promote your most compelling content & CTAs

We can’t get enough of this new metric. Basically, this tells you where on your Page your audience is spending the most amount of time. Why is this important? With this information, you can decide where you want to post your most compelling content and calls-to-action. You’ll probably find that the majority of your audience spends the most time on your Timeline. Okay, that’s to be assumed. But you also might realize that a good amount spends some time on your Info tab. Try updating this section often with links to new promotions, content, contests, etc. Wherever your audience spends its time, that’s where you want to be. Additionally, if you run specific campaigns within dedicated tabs, you can measure performance and optimize them using these metrics.

3. Use When Your Fans Are Online + Individual Post Reach + Engagement to determine when to post

Wait a sec, why can’t I just use When Your Fans Are Online to determine, well, when my fans are online? Isn’t that when I should be posting all the content? No.

When Your Fans Are Online is a little deceiving because it tells you when your fans are viewing any Facebook posts, not just yours. So if you want to figure out when your fans are viewing and engaging with your posts specifically, you’ll need to use a combination of this metric plus Individual Post Reach plus Engagements.

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It’s more time consuming, but it’s a much more accurate way to determine if the drastic changes you’re about to make to your content posting are actually going to pay off. We actually encourage this approach rather than paying attention to “industry standard” advice on best time of week/day to post because it’s incredibly variable from brand to brand.

4. Use Engaged Users vs. Consumers to determine how much and with what your audience is engaged

First, let’s be clear on the two definitions: Engaged Users are those who clicked or created a story anywhere on your Page (including liking your Page), while Consumers are those who clicked anywhere on your post (whether or not the click generated a story). Take a moment to let that sink in because I just got confused writing it.

Because of the slight nuances, Engaged Users is the best metric to determine Page performance while Consumers is the best metric to determine overall post performance. You can also break down Consumers into the type of action they took on your posts (link clicks, video plays, photo views, etc.) to determine which type of specific content performs the best. Take it a step further and compare Consumers as a percentage of Reach to see, at post level, the percentage of your total audience that engaged with your posts.

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5. Use Engaged Users to evaluate social CTAs

You can also use Consumers to evaluate the calls-to-action you include in your posts. For example, if the goal of a post is to drive traffic to a landing page on which you’ll convert visitors to leads, you’ll want to track that against clicks on the post. Maybe you’re trying to drive likes on a photo campaign, in which case you can track likes at the post level. This is especially useful if you want to test different post copy to see which resonates better with your audience and results in more goal conversions.

6. Use Engagement Rate & Total Engagements to determine which posts to boost with ad spend

No two Facebook posts are created equal, so all of your posts will reach different volumes of audience and generate varying levels of engagement. This is where Engagement Rate comes in. Use this metric to determine how well posts are performing on the engagement scale relative to how many impressions they’ve received. Use Total Engagements to see which individual posts performed the best overall, regardless of reach, to find outliers that might kill it on engagement but didn’t reach nearly as many people as others. These two metrics become extremely helpful when deciding which posts you should boost with some ad spend. Obviously you want to boost only the best-performing organic posts because you’re a smart marketer and you know that the best-performing organic content is likely going to be your best-performing paid content.

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7. Use Paid vs. Organic metrics to differentiate between… paid and organic

A lot of social media marketers struggle with differentiating between organic and paid contributions to their campaigns. With Paid vs. Organic metrics (like Likes, Reach and Impressions), you don’t need to worry about this anymore. Use these to accurately differentiate among organic and paid activities to see how these initiatives perform separately as well as how paid campaigns might affect your organic growth. These numbers are especially important for setting goals and determining advertising budget.

8. Use Like Sources to see how different tactics contribute to growth

Aside from simply differentiating between paid and organic, you’ll want to determine which tactics (paid vs. organic vs. viral) are contributing the most to Page growth — such as events, content, trends or third party apps. Breaking down how each of these impacts your Page can help you determine which initiatives you want to continue running and which you want to scrap.

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9. Use Reach to determine how well your combined tactics are performing

Reach measures your Page’s effective audience (not just fans) and is driven by the Facebook Algorithm. Many of your fans don’t see all of your posts and often, a lot of the people who do see your posts aren’t your fans. Keeping an eye on Reach over time can show you how the tactics you’re implementing to drive active and engaged fans who are willing to share your content are paying off. Basically, Reach can tell you whether or not the previous 8 tips in this white paper are actually legit.

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Use Negative Feedback to see how your Reach is impacted

There are four types of negative feedback users can give to your Page: Hide clicks, which hide a specific post from their News Feeds; Hide All clicks, which hide all posts from your brand from their News Feeds; Report Spam, which is when a user reports one of your posts as spam; and Unlikes, which is when a user elects to unlike your Page. If anyone does any of these things to your post or Page, your Page will be shut down.

Just kidding. It’s definitely not the end of the world; in fact, you should expect it to happen occasionally, especially as your Page’s audience grows. But it’s important that you realize how these elements affect your overall Reach (and vice versa).

10.

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The best part about the Negative Feedback metric is it gives you the opportunity to figure out what you’re doing that’s bothering people and to stop doing that bothersome thing. Check out Negative Feedback at the post level — you should be able to figure out the type of content that isn’t jelling with your audience pretty easily.

As your Reach grows, you can assume that your Negative Feedback will grow too. Account for this by measuring Negative Feedback as a percentage of Reach (or Negative Feedback Rate). Peaks in NFR can show you how much Negative Feedback is too much.

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CONCLUSION

Use a combination of these actionable Facebook Insights to step up your Facebook game. Some of these metrics you’ll need to actually export the Insights data in order to see, so don’t get confused if you don’t see them in your dashboard. Alternatively, we can offer you something even better. We just updated our Facebook Insights report to reflect the latest changes to the native Facebook Insights, so you can view all of your data in beautiful charts in Excel and online (we also provide you with the raw data so you can do your own analysis). The best part? All of those charts are in one place, so there’s no digging through data to get the visuals you want.

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