Facebook discontinued its official Facebook Analytics in 2021, but the platform still offers many other ways to collect valuable information and insights.
As we head into 2023, Facebook remains the world’s most-used social media platform – by a long shot. It might not get the press of TikTok or Twitter, but with nearly 3 billion global active users, its reach is still simply unmatched.
With such a large potential audience, Facebook can seem a little overwhelming – how do you know what works and connect with your community on such a giant platform? Facebook analytics are a critical tool to help answer these questions and ensure you build a Facebook marketing strategy that works for your brand.
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Facebook analytics are the data and tools you need to track your brand’s performance on the world’s most popular social network.
Tracking Facebook analytics helps you understand your past Facebook performance and tweak your future strategy. You can use the data you gain through Facebook analytics to create a Facebook-specific report, or build it into an overall social media report that tracks the performance of all your social accounts.
Reviewing your Facebook analytics is also an important way to understand your audience. There’s a veritable treasure trove of data available to help reveal exactly who is engaging with and following your content, with demographic and geographic data that covers age, sex, location, and more.
All of this can help you either refine your content to reach the audience you want, or pivot your strategy to even better engage the people who are already tuning in.
Facebook used to have a native analytics tool called, appropriately enough, Facebook Analytics. That tool was discontinued in 2021, but there are still plenty of ways to access your Facebook analytics data.
Meta Business Suite has replaced Facebook Analytics as the native tool to access analytics for Facebook. Here, you can see metrics, trends, and visual reports to help you gain insights about your overall Facebook account or individual posts.
Here’s how to find your Facebook Analytics in Meta Business Suite:
Facebook Insights is now part of the Meta Professional Dashboard. Here you can review basic insights about your Page, posts, and audience. The data here is quite basic and does not go back very far in time (from a max of 28 to 90 days) but can provide a good quick overview of what’s happening with your Page.
To access Page Insights:
You can also access very basic insights about each post directly from your Facebook Page. Click See insights and ads under any post to bring up a pop-up with insights specific to that post.
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that includes advanced (but super easy to use) Facebook analytics.
Hootsuite’s Analytics track your Facebook data in detail alongside your results from other social accounts. This simplifies your social media analytics work. It saves time and makes it easy to compare aggregate results across networks.
Fun fact: The vast majority of people who use Instagram and TikTok also use Facebook. You’ll find 82.9% of Instagram users and 83.4% of TikTok users on FB.
Comparing results across platforms is the only way to understand what your audience expects from you on each platform, and how best to connect with them in each context. Hootsuite Analytics allows you to see how your audience responds on each platform so you can better understand where your Facebook and social media marketing efforts fit into the bigger picture.
That said, if you prefer to focus specifically on your Facebook results, you can also use Hootsuite Analytics to dive deep into all the Facebook metrics that matter most to your business. You can then create and export a custom report, or schedule reports to automatically deliver the data to your inbox. You can use the sharing options to automatically share with colleagues and stakeholders throughout your organization.
Hootsuite’s Facebook Analytics also show you a heatmap that tells you exactly when your audience is most likely to be online, and provides custom recommendations for the best time to post based on your engagement goals.
Here’s how to find your Facebook analytics in Hootsuite:
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Now that you know where to find your Facebook analytics data, let’s look at some of the most important metrics for you to track.
The metrics here are the same as for Facebook posts. You can also scroll down to the bottom of the screen to see your stories with the highest reach, highest sticker taps and most replies. Again, you can see the data for each specific story by clicking on Content under the Content heading.
Oddly enough, Facebook considers Reels to be Posts in the Insights interface. To access your Face Reels Insights in Meta Business Manager, go to Insights>Content>Content, then unselect ads and stories in the top drop-down menu.
To make things more (or less?) confusing, within the Posts section of Content Insights, the Type column will identify Reels as Reels.
Source: Meta Business Manager
For each reel, you can track:
Rather than Meta Business Suite, the best native tool for viewing your Facebook ads analytics is Meta Ads Manager. You can also see Facebook ads analytics reports alongside your organic reporting in Hootsuite Analytics.
Facebook Groups are an amazing way for brands to build fan communities — and an even better way to collect data on who your most passionate followers are through your group’s Admin Tools. You can only see insights for Groups with 50 or more members.
You can find Live analytics by clicking on the Live video you’d like to see the metrics for.
So – that’s a lot. Keep in mind that not every metric will be equally important for your business. When you’re first getting started with Facebook analytics, focus on a few key metrics that align with your business goals and social strategy. Over time, you can start tracking more detailed metrics to get a more in-depth picture of your success on Facebook.
Still have burning questions? We have answers.
The most basic option is to click See insights and ads under any of your Facebook posts. This gives you a high-level snapshot of the success of that post. For more detailed analytics, reports, graphs, and comparisons, you’ll need to use Meta Business Suite, Facebook Page Insights, or Hootsuite Analytics.
What you see when you check your Facebook analytics depends on which tool you use. Clicking on insights for any individual post from your Facebook page brings up a pop-up with quick stats for impressions, reach and engagement.
Facebook analytics tools can provide much more information than that, from your overall Page metrics to comparing the success of your Facebook efforts to those on other platforms.
Facebook Insights does still exist, but it’s now accessible directly from your Facebook Page itself or from the Professional dashboard. So, Facebook Insights no longer exists as a standalone tool, but the information is still available.
Use Hootsuite to schedule all of your social media posts, engage with your followers, and track the success of your efforts. Sign up today.
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