Facebook Ad Analytics: How Should Social Media Managers Read Facebook Metrics?

We all want our content to sparkle. We want to be creative, we want our posts to be blockbusters and want to be social media stars. 

We don’t want to analyze, though. We are constantly looking for excuses not to dig into social media statistics. Understanding social media analytics is just overwhelming and instead of giving it a go, we are just giving… up. 

Today, we would like to make life easier for you by getting you through Facebook marketing analytics and showing you that there is nothing to be scared of.

What is social media analytics?

Long story short: it is a set of data reflecting your performance. Your post performance or interaction rates are included in statistics. By generating and comparing statistics, you can see whether you are heading in the right direction or your results are getting worse so you should start optimizing your strategy. Understanding social media analytics is extremely important, but we will cover it in the next paragraphs. 

You can analyze organic results (such as reach or engagement) or paid results gained in ad campaigns. Facebook Ad Analytics is really advanced and can help you manage your campaigns in a more efficient way. 

Why is Facebook analytics important?

Why do we use social media analytics? We already mentioned one of the most important reasons: numbers do not lie and they will definitely tell you what you are doing right and where there are some areas for potential improvement. 

With social media analytics, you can quickly evaluate what kind of content works for your audience, and who actually your audience is. It can turn out that you thought you were speaking to the right people, but statistics can tell otherwise.

Benefits of social media analytics are undisputable. While many businesses are present on Facebook, not many of them actually care about analytics. The outcome? Low engagement, lack of meeting KPIs or no business results despite efforts. Fixing all those mistakes may be impossible without quite a few numbers. Facebook marketing analytics, both for unpaid and paid activities, is crucial if you want to be successful.

How to get social media analytics?

Depending on the platform you want to analyze, you will be given some set of statistics built-in on a particular social media channel. For example, for Facebook, Facebook Analytics tools are at your disposal. Also Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn provide some general info. You can use third-party tools to acquire some of the analytics, too.

How to read Facebook analytics?

Take a glance at Facebook marketing analytics. 

You can access the data above (of course, relevant to your Facebook Page) by clicking on Insights located in the top bar on your page. 

Those statistics can be tricky for those who have never taken a look at them before. For organic results, you should only look at results displayed in blue (green ones refer to paid efforts). 

What can you take out of those statistics?

• how many followers/likes your page got in the last 28 days and what the trend looks like
• how many 3-second video views your video content got
• what was your average post reach 
• how many actions were taken below your posts
• how many views your page got

It says a lot, but it can be extremely difficult for people who never really were into analytics and making some conclusions out of these statistics.

The exemplary conclusions:

• post engagement has increased: content we create now is better
• page reach has decreased: we should think about investing in paid promotion or test out new forms of engaging our audience
• we had a few days where the number of followers dynamically grew: let’s find out what we did that attracted so many new people

Of course, you need to take into consideration a few factors that could affect those results: for example, some RTM posts or even a social media crisis. You could notice then an increased interest in your page, but not by your target group and the engagement does not have to be positive at all in the light of a crisis. Every coin has two sides.

A short introduction to FB campaign analytics

While it is a story for another article, we owe you some explanation of the complexity of Facebook campaign analytics. We live in a social era of “Pay to Play”, where brands are indirectly forced to pay for their visibility on Facebook. This is where another set of metrics is to be analyzed.

How to start?

Setting up your goals is crucial at this stage. If you aim for higher sales, your primary choice should not be raising brand awareness or engagement. If you want to get more leads, choose Lead Ads and optimize for Cost Per Lead. If you want to get more leads but via your website, optimizing for Traffic and playing with pixels can be a way to go. As long as you test out many available options, you should not make any basic mistakes from day one. 

For many rookies in the world of social media, paid promotion means boosting posts with the feature available on your Page overview. However, to optimize your campaigns and use all of the options Facebook gives you, you should invest in promotion via Power Editor and Ads Manager. Why? Boosting posts only gives you the option to raise engagement. If your goal is sales, you should look at optimizing CPC, CPS or CPL. Those more advanced options, including playing around target groups and creatives a bit more, are accessible in the Power Editor, but not via classic boosting through the page. Power Editor opens the new world of advertising possibilities: from a very precise selection of campaign goals, target groups and placements, through behaviour and bidding, to CTAs, links and preparing creatives. 

Long story short: you can miss the boat if you only use the “Boost post” button. 

Why is optimization so important?

No one likes burning money. If you leave campaigns on their own, without any control, there is a possibility that something goes wrong or you leave your campaigns completely unoptimized. Even though it can be a matter of “trial and error” with small budgets – with larger budgets it can be reflected in losing a lot of money.

Optimizing your campaign means optimizing your budget and saving money, but that’s not the only reason behind optimization. By adjusting campaigns according to its current effects, you can answer quite a few questions. Does the campaign reach the desired target group? Does it, actually, even work? How can we optimize it to make it even more successful? Which persona engages with the campaign the most? Without analyzing and optimizing your campaign, you can only guess what the answers are. 

Is that all about Facebook ad campaigns? 

Of course, not. There are many complex blog posts and books concerning this topic, so you can expect us to elaborate on this soon. For now, let’s come back to general metrics. 

What metrics to measure on Facebook?

Depending on the goal of your ad campaign, you need to take different results into consideration and focus on a few crucial metrics within Facebook ad analytics.

For brand awareness, you may want to look at engagement and reach first. However, if your goal is to sell more product in your shop online, 3-second video views may not work wonders for you. If you want to promote your local business, e.g. restaurant, you need to be careful with targeting. Having a crazy engagement, but not among your target group, can mean that all that work was for nothing.

Is engagement overrated?

Engagement can help you:

• evaluate whether the creative part of your post is likeable and delivers desired reactions
• adjust your social media strategy based on delivered metrics

However, you should not take engagement as the Holy Grail. 

Engagement rate does not show you whether brand recognition or brand loyalty are increased. It does not show you whether someone bought, or is going to buy: even if they loved your post. That’s why you always need to choose the goal of your campaign based on your KPIs.

Engagement rate or 3-second video views are tricky. They may make you feel successful, but then, when you look into statistics a bit more, you can see that they drove you zero business results. 

Look at statistics like reach, cost per click or cost per lead to identify activities that work for you, and those that bring no results.

You should always look at metrics and analyze how social media analytics can help you achieve your business goals and set KPIs.

Analyze your Facebook performance with Kontentino

Did you know that you can analyze Facebook metrics directly in Kontentino? While there are many Facebook analytics tools out there, Kontentino stands out with transparent, clear and easy to understand reports you can send to your clients straight away. 

Kontentino analytics: what is in it for you?

You can analyze the whole page performance – below you can see just a cutout of more detailed statistics (you can download them in a form of simple or advanced PDF and send them to your clients). 

What makes it different from Facebook Insights? You are not overloaded with data and you can take your time to read and understand them. For example, you can see the peak of reach on that particular page. Social media managers should spend time analyzing what that peak was caused by and find out how social media analytics can help in repeating this success. Many Facebook analytics tools do not deliver data in such a clean, user-friendly way. Also, you can see here Facebook marketing analytics if you used any campaigns. 

With Kontentino, numbers are put into reports and conclusions, and data is put into context. Even if you are not an analytical pro, you will be able to read statistics and take advantage of the results. No more wondering why one post performed well, and another one didn’t hit the spot. 

Insights & Reporting tab helps you with:

• arranging posts from the best-performing ones, according to your chosen metric 
• checking objectives and budgets of each post 
• generating Facebook reports for further analysing
• analyzing your strategy on the Page and Post level

Since the results are shown in a simple and very transparent way, you’ll no longer have problems with reading them correctly and make some analysis or comparison between the selected pieces of content. 

You can analyze separate posts as you are given very detailed statistics that, additionally, are explained further. 

Above, you can see a set of metrics. This is where understanding social media analytics come in handy. While the number of shares looks impressive, the average completion of the video is fairly short (the clip is 90 seconds long), the number of comments could always be higher and the engagement rate is below 10%. However, if you bear in mind that video reached more than 600 thousand unique Facebook users organically, you can take it as a small success.

Good practices for Facebook marketing analytics

• analyze your performance on a regular basis. Your page is growing and you publish content regularly. Why would you check statistics only from time to time?
• always care about targeting. It is not rocket science to get a lot of likes or comments: it is rocket science to get them from the right audience. Facebook analytics tools are crucial for finding out whether your content engages people that matter to your business the most.
• test out new ways of reaching out to your desired target groups. Looking at your performance can help you eliminate bottlenecks and see what kind of content is warmly welcomed. Another reason to take a look at statistics!
• do not burn money on campaign goals that do not match your business and goals. No matter how cheap it turns out to be, it may deliver you zero to little result. If you are wondering how social media analytics can help, here comes another answer.
• no excuses about lack of analytics. If you feel that you have too many things to do, try to automate some of the tedious social media tasks and dig into analytics. Understanding social media analytics can take you some time, but your Page would thank you for that. 

Let’s wrap it up!

You honestly do not have to be an analytical pro (however, you should be aiming for it!), but you need to understand how social media analytics can help you improve your performance. Facebook ad analytics can help you recognize areas for improvement and areas you are great at. We know that understanding social media analytics is not easy: that is why in Kontentino you can access and generate reports that will make all those numbers at least a bit easier for you. Good luck!