Just when you thought you had Facebook’s internal tools on lock, we’re throwing you a curveball with one of it’s newest rollouts, Facebook’s Analytics tool. I’m not talking about pulling reports & audience insights through the UI… I’m talking about this little hidden gem in the toolbar menu of the Business Manager here.
So what’s the purpose you ask? The Facebook Analytics tool is your solution for three key things:
- Visualizing your Marketing Funnel
- Measuring and Monitoring the true effects of your cross- channel campaigns
- Visualizing your data with helpful graphs to pulse performance at a glance.
If you’re at all familiar with Google Analytics, learning how to use this tool will be a breeze. If you aren’t familiar with GA don’t worry, this tool is extremely user friendly and pretty self explanatory.
Once you click into the Analytics Tool Bar (pictured above), you’re brought to a Overview page that provides you with helpful at a glance insights and data like page activity, audience, traffic sources, active users, demographics, etc.
Related: Facebook Settings: The Complete Guide
From here, you’re able to hop over into an Activity Report where you can pull in depth, granular insights on data that can help you better build & optimize your Facebook Ad Strategy. In order to provide you with the most helpful information, I’m going to be using the blog post to build a glossary to help you understand how to best utilize the tool for your Facebook Ad strategy.
Active Users: This tab quantifies the amount of unique users, total events, and average events per user. User Activity is also displayed in addition to age/gender, and session length
Revenue: Allows you to understand the purchase value of each customer, metrics ranging from Total Revenue, Total Purchases, to Average purchases per user, etc. You can also utilize this to check an at-a-glance graph
Funnels: This feature functions as a tool to help you improve your conversion rate for registrations, checkouts, purchases and more by building out the events that bring your customers from first touch to purchase.
Retention: Great part about this feature is it allows you to see your User Site Retention and you’re able to see how frequent users are coming back to your site WoW.
Cohorts: Cohorts are groups of people who perform two events you choose during a given time period, such as adding items to a cart and then purchasing. Cohorts help you measure and optimize for retention, lifetime value, and more! This is a key tool for any ecommerce or DTC clients you have.
Breakdowns: Allow you to understand where your users are viewing your site. Information ranging from Social source to referer domain to device can all be found here. You’re also able to view this data as a pivot table which can be helpful in figuring out which platform is best to advertise on.
Percentiles: This tool allows you to see what percentile of users viewed your page more than once. You can also customize the data to analyze the distribution of activity or value for events that you have created.
Events: This is where you can see actions that people have taken on your site, anything from new user activity to content view to leads & purchases.
Event Debugging: Things are getting pretty granular with this one! Event Debugging Allows you to see the URL, Meta , Open Graph, and Data Layer from the most recent sessions.
Overlap: This feature gives you an easy to read graph to see users who take actions across channels and other parameters. Ie. People who view from their phone and then look on their computer.
Now for the fun part! Check out some of the helpful insights as to WHO is coming to your website and understand their habits & personality. This will be key information to help you build out your marketing & ad campaigns to successfully bring site visitors through the marketing funnel. Similar to “Audience Insights” within the Facebook platform, Analytics also provides insights into your audience. Check out some of the tabs below to understand what data you can pull from this section of the UI.
Related: What is a Marketing Funnel?
People
Highlights: This is the high level overview of your site traffic, where you can find key demographic information & locations at a glance.
Demographics: This section gets a little more granular than the highlights section above, and pulls information like occupation, education level, relationship status, etc. This is a great tool if you’re looking to target a certain skill set or education tier.
Page Likes: This feature allows you to see what are the top pages your site visitors like on Facebook. This is a great way to build out interest based targeting for your Facebook ads if you’re looking to acquire completely new customers outside building a Lookalike Audience.
Technology: Allows you to see what specific type of devices your users are viewing your site from. This information gets down to the type of Windows or Mac your customers are using.
Household/Purchase: Covers any information about household income, retail spending, purchase behaviors, spending methods (bank card vs. store card) and lifestyles.
Hopefully this was a clear, concise, and simple way for you to understand Facebook Analytics holistically. Again, it’s a really great tool for truly understanding the behaviors & habits of your site visitors, which in turn will be an integral part in building out your retargeting campaigns and hot traffic campaigns. Not to mention, the “People” insights will also play an integral role in helping you successfully identify & build out cold audiences outside your standard Lookalike audiences.
Stay tuned for a follow up blogpost on how to best utilize these tools to build out your Facebook Ad strategy. Feel free to leave a comment below with any questions!
