Howto setup a basic Facebook analytics scheme for your Facebook page
1. HOWTO
SETUP A BASIC FACEBOOK ANALYTICS
SCHEME FOR YOUR PAGE
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2. When launching your Facebook page as a small or medium sized
business, you should setup and use some Facebook analytics in
order to analyze and evaluate the effect of your social activities.
As we have a lot of discussions with our clients and know the landscape for
social media analytics tools quite well, we want to give you some insight
on what we would recommend as a initial setup. This whitepaper should
be a starting point for you to see what is possible and then adjust and
optimize your Facebook analytics and reporting from there. Here are some
recommendations.
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4. With Facebook‘s built-in „Facebook Insights“ statistics you can get
information on the performance of your content and your page.
You can analyze every individual post you make in near-realtime
and see how much reach you got, how many people engage with
the post and how many people derive a social action from it
(people talking about this).
In the last months there were a lot of discussions on reduced organic reach,
so this is a great point to actually see how this behaves for your page. You
can also see the virality of each post, which is the people talking about
this number divided by the reach. Go ahead and compare your posts with
each other and see which content works the best with your audience. The
post table alone makes it possible to optimize your posts based on content,
posting time and other factors.
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5. The best thing with Facebook Insights is that they are completely
free. You can also export the data to Excel or other apps. Beside
the detailed post analyses you can also see the general metrics
for your whole page, for example the number of likes/fans you
are getting or the overall reach and people talking about values.
You shouldn‘t focus too much on the like/fan count of your page
and rather optimize for interactions.
This will make your communication really targeted to the people you want to
reach and advertising on Facebook will be more efficient as you don‘t waste
money on fans that are not in your target audience.
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7. When you got the basic tracking of your own page done, its
time to look at other pages in your sector. It can give you great
insight to see how your competitors pages are performing and
what works for them. In the first bullet point above I mentioned
that you should optimize your posts based on virality. With the
competitor tracking it is possible to compare the performance
of your posts against other pages as well, so it gives you a much
better estimate if the performance you are getting is good enough.
Additionally, analyzing other pages performance makes it very transparent
for you if they are running ad campaigns other competitions or offline events
which have effects on their Facebook presence. When you see a peak in a
certain metric for your competitor, you can look up what was the reason for
this.
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8. By adopting good working examples from other pages and avoid
negative examples that you see, you can get a much faster learning
curve.
To get this competitive data you can do it either manually (by looking at the
page every day or by putting data in Excel) or you can use a tool like our
quintly. Our tool makes it very easy for you to get these stats, as everything
is done automatically. You just need to login and access the stats, we take
care of all the rest.
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10. When you have defined and setup all the metrics you want to
use for your tracking, its time to setup a regular reporting (via
email in PDF or similar format) within your company in order to
get all the important people on board and show them the success
of your work on Facebook.
By sending around KPIs in a weekly interval, everyone sees how it is going
and if there is room for improvement. Most of the people doing Facebook
Marketing struggle because they cannot show the positive effect internally
and therefore it gets tough to get budgets for future activities. If you already
have a balanced scorecard setup in your company, it makes sense to add the
Facebook analytics KPIs to it as well.
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11. Note that it is important that your reporting changes from time to
time. Facebook develops very fast and new KPIs will be defined
sooner than later.
Keeping your reporting flexible and adjusting to the right KPIs is very
important. The worst that can happen is that you notice after a year or two,
that you optimized for the wrong KPIs and educated your management on
the wrong metrics.
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13. When you are an online company or run a website on which
you want to drive conversions, it is very important to measure
the effect of your Facebook activities to your website. If you
generate sales from this, than this is the only way you can proof
the effect of your page on the actual sales, which is what most
of the management wants to see.
You can do this by analyzing all the incoming traffic from Facebook and see
what works best in terms of conversions. When creating your posts and you
have a link pointing to your website in it, you should add tracking parameters,
so that you can use your normal web tracking software to see the effect.
Most companies who have setup a web tracking software for their website
already monitor conversions, so the traffic coming from the Facebook page
is just another channel. When you are using Google Analytics, you should for
example set the URL parameters utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign
accordingly.
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14. Don’t get too distracted
by Facebook analytics and metrics
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15. When taking a look at all these things above, don’t forget to
focus on your actual work. There is a nearly unlimited number of
metrics you can track which can be very confusing and distracting
for you and other people in the company. The setup of the right
KPIs is very individual and you should check what works best in
your case.
In the end I would recommend to focus on the 3-5 most important KPIs and
not setup Excel sheets with hundreds of rows. We have seen many examples
where people wanted to make it especially good and in the end the whole
process was so complicated that no one in the company would understand it.
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16. Get In Touch: www.quintly.com
info@quintly.com
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About the autor:
Alex is Founder and CEO of quintly. quintly is a service
to track and compare the performance of your social
media profiles.
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