You want to build a compelling Facebook fan page with consistent engagement, but how do you understand what it is that your fans are consuming, engaging with and sharing? Facebook Insights can provide the answers but the terminology is confusing (and sometimes changes!) and the sheer number of metrics can be overwhelming for marketers / community managers.
This presentation forms the basis of the eGenie Facebook Insights Training course and cuts through the clutter, explaining everything in simple terms so that you can really understand which metrics are appropriate when. The course can be tailored to meet your specific requirements, but aims to cover the following areas:
- Understand how to set clear, measurable goals
- Understanding the metrics that are available within Insights
- Learning about who sees your posts, how this is affected by EdgeRank and how this knowledge can enable you to post most effectively
- Learning what the numbers really mean and what action is appropriate in different situations
- Discovering how you can use the power of Facebook Insights to influence your marketing strategy because you understand what is working and what isn't
For more information on how eGenie can help, contact us now!
3. Agenda
• Introductions
• What, Why and Where of Facebook Insights
• Deeper Dive into Important Metrics
• Measuring Success
• Third Party Tools
4. Who am I?
• John Wood
• Founder of eGenie
• Working with Digital
Analytics:
for 10 years
• Believes:
A report is worth nothing unless it is actionable
5. Introductions
• Who are you?
• What do you do?
• What do you want to get out of this session?
7. What is Facebook Insights?
• Insights provides measurements on your
Page's performance
– available after at least 30 people like your Page
• Find anonymised demographic data about
your audience and see how people are
discovering and responding to your posts
8. Why do we care?
• Measure:
– What is working?
– What isn’t?
• … so that we can understand and improve
9. How do we get Insights?
Go to page, but must have permission:
10. High Level Insights - Overview
• How many fans are there and how is this changing (Page Likes)?
• How many people see content (Reach)?
• How many people are engaged?
13. High Level Insights - Overview
• Type
– Link Click
– Other Click (e.g. Status)
– Photo View
• Targeting
– Public
– Friends
• Reach
– number of unique users who have seen your content
• Engagement
– Likes
– Comments
– Shares
– Other clicks
14. High Level Insights - Overview
• Benchmarking against Competitors
• Set up to 5 other Facebook Pages
15. High Level Insights - Likes
• How many Fans do you have?
• Is your Facebook Page fan-base growing?
16. Digression - Do You want Likes?
• If you have 0 Likes, no one will see your Posts
– Therefore you need Fans…
• Posts are only seen by active, recently
engaged Fans
• Unengaged Fans are worthless - do not do
anything to arbitrarily inflate that number
• Target those that you want to become Fans
• But it is important to know where they come
from (see later)
17. What is an Engaged Fan?
• To Like is a passive action and not time-consuming
• Comment and Share show true engagement
• Having acted they are more likely to:
– sign up for a newsletter
– click through to a product
18. How do we get Engaged Fans?
• Ask questions
• Create posts that get people interested
• Contests
• …
19. High Level Insights - Likes
• Note American Time Zone
• There are a number of ways of changing the date
21. High Level Insights - Likes
• Not all change is good!
• What are the causes of change?
22. High Level Insights - Likes
• Where were they when they Liked your Page?
• Where did you succeed in engaging people?
23. Reach
• The number of unique users (Fans and non-
Fans) who have seen your content
– Organic
– Paid
– Viral
• Depends on EdgeRank (which we will come on
to later)
24. Organic
• “Users visited your Page or saw your Page or
one of its posts in News Feed or Ticker.”
• “Users” can be Fans, or not!
25. Paid
• “Users who viewed a Sponsored Story or ad
that promoted your post or Page.”
26. Viral
• “Users saw your Page or one of its posts from
a story generated by a friend.”
29. High Level Insights - Reach
• Hint - hover over a point to highlight the trend for that metric
30. High Level Insights - Reach
• Engagement can be negative
• If it is, when did it occur and so what could have caused it?
31. High Level Insights - Reach
• Above we saw Post Reach (i.e. from Posts!)
• Also available is Total Reach, i.e. Posts and everything else
• Both measure People
32. Visits
• A unique user may visit the site more than
once
33. High Level Insights - Visits
• Is anyone going to a Newsletter Tab or a Contact Tab?
34. High Level Insights - Visits
• Other Activity – in addition to Likes, Comments and Shares
35. High Level Insights - Visits
• Probably your website is top…
• You may be getting traffic from Google…
• How effective are newsletters or other cross-promotional
techniques?
39. High level Insights - Posts
• What post types work best?
Did your status updates get more reach then your
image posts?
Which post type tended to get more comments and
shares?
40. High level Insights - Posts
• What engagement do your competitors get compared with
yours?
• When do they post?
• How frequently?
41. What is EdgeRank?
• EdgeRank is the algorithm used by Facebook
to determine what appears in each individual
newsfeed and where it appears in each
newsfeed.
• The algorithm is made of three variables:
Affinity (Ue)
Weight (We)
Time Decay (De)
• ΣUeWeDe
42. Affinity (Ue)
• The affinity score measure the relationship or
connection between two users. The closer the
relationship or connection, the higher the
score.
• E.g. I am friends with my sister on Facebook,
we have 70 mutual friends and I write on her
wall regularly. We have a high affinity score so
Facebook will include her in my newsfeed.
43. Weight (We)
• Posts are weighted differently:
1. Photos/ videos
2. Links
3. Plain text updates
• Facebook changes the weight according to
what they believe the user will find most
engaging
44. Time decay (De)
• How old the post is!
• Posts become ‘old news’ over time, the time
decay enables the newsfeed to remain up to
date with recent news
45. Edgerank Is Dead?
• In mid 2013 Facebook announced that they
would be introducing a completely new algorithm
which now included as many as 100,000 different
elements
• The new algorithm works by bumping stories you
don’t see during a browsing session to the top of
your newsfeed in your next browsing session
• This can be affected by the amount of
engagement (likes, comments and shares) a post
receives
46. EdgeRank is dead cont.
• Another change to the algorithm is the Last
Actor
• This takes into account your last 50
interactions (likes, comments and shares)
• People who you have engaged with most
recently are given more weight and Facebook
will push their posts higher in the News Feed
47. EdgeRank is dead cont.
• Post types – The News Feed algorithm also
takes into account the type of post a user
tends to interact with
• Device capabilities – The News Feed algorithm
also takes into consideration the device being
used, e.g. a user with a slow internet
connection is likely to see more text updates
48. EdgeRank lives on
• Despite Facebook’s new algorithm being said
to now consist of over 100,000 variables the
original EdgeRank variables still remain very
important in the new algorithm
49. Improving your Page’s rank
• Be precise – posts over 250 characters receive
60% less likes than those between 100 and
250 characters long
• Visuals –
Photo albums receive 180% more engagement
Photos receive 120% more engagement
Videos receive 100% more engagement
50. Improving your Page’s rank cont.
• Post regularly – 96% of fans won’t return to a
page so regular posts are the only way of
reaching them
• Time – Different audiences will use Facebook at
different times, test different times of day to find
when your audience are most active
• Segmenting – Facebook allows you to target who
will see your updates
Male / Female
Relationship status etc.
51. Improving your Page’s rank cont.
• Social Call To Action (CTA) – with the new
algorithm taking into account the level of
engagement with a post, it is important for
people to be engaging with your posts
• People often won’t take action unless you tell
them to e.g.
“please share”
“comment below”
52. Facebook Fraud – a follow on from
“Virtual Bagel”
Derek Muller from science blog Veritasium
55. Facebook response to the video
• Fake likes don’t help us. For the last two years, we have
focused on proving that our ads drive business results and we
have even updated our ads to focus more on driving business
objectives
• Those kinds of real-world results would not be possible with
fake likes. In addition, we are continually improving the
systems we have to monitor and remove fake likes from the
system
• Just to be clear, he created a low quality page about
something a lot of people like – cats. He spent $10 and got
150 people who liked cats to like the page
• They may also like a lot of other pages which does not mean
that they are not real people – lots of real people like lots of
things
56. So, do we want to do
Facebook Advertising?
• The Facebook ad feature set has changed
significantly since then
• These features either didn’t exist or were unlikely
to be used during these tests:
– Conversion Tracking
– Custom Audiences
– Lookalike Audiences
– Website Custom Audiences (Re-targetting)
– FBX
– Partner Categories
– Facebook’s new ad reports
57. High level Insights - People
• Who likes you?
• Do they fit the profile of who you want to attract?
58. High level Insights - People
• If any of your Page posts have been Liked or Shared or
Promoted, you will have reached more than just your
existing fan-base
• How does this compare with your Fans?
62. Exporting data
• Select
– Date range
– File format
• Download one of
– Page Level data
• Old
• New
– Post Level data
• Old
• New
63. Data Export – 65 tabs of data!
• Daily, Weekly, 28 Days
• Talking About This
• Stories
• Likes, Unlikes, Friends of Fans
• Engaged Users
• Total Reach
• Organic Reach
• Paid Reach
• Viral Reach
• Impressions
• Organic Impressions
• Paid Impressions
• Viral Impressions
• Logged-In Views
• Negative Feedback
• Like Sources
• Viral Reach by Story Type
• Viral Impressions by Story Type
• Frequency Distribution
• Talking About This by Story Type
• Interactions by Type
• Consumptions
• Likes Detailed Demographics
• Reach Detailed Demographics
• Talking About This Detailed Demo
• External Referrer
• Check-in Details
68. Getting Insights data programmatically
• A published API is available at
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/
reference/v2.0/insights
to build e.g. dashboards if you don’t want to
download
69. Page Stories
• Likes of your Page
• Likes, comments on, or shares of your Page
posts
• Answers to a Question you’ve asked
• Responses to your Event
• Mentions of your Page
• Tags of your Page in a photo
• Check-ins or Recommendations of your Place
70. More Metrics….
• Page Talking About This: Number of unique
users sharing stories about your page
• Logged-In Page Views: Total number of Page
Views from users logged into Facebook
• Engagement: includes any click or story
created
71. Even More Metrics….
• Page Consumers: The number of unique users
who clicked on any of your content
• Page Consumptions: The total number of
clicks on any of your content
72. Even Even More Metrics
• Page Engaged Users: The number of unique
users who engaged with your Page
73. Post Level Metrics
• Logged in Page Views
• Post Consumers
• Post Consumptions
• Post Engaged Users
• Post Impressions
• Post Reach
• Paid & Organic Reach
& Impressions
• Post Stories
• Post Talking About
this
• Post Viral Impressions
• Post Viral Reach
74. Impressions & Reach
• Post Impressions
• Post Reach
• Paid & Organic Reach & Impressions
• Post Viral Impressions
• Post Viral Reach
75. Post Stories
• Post Stories: The number of stories generated
about your Page post. Stories include:
– Likes, comments on, or shares of your Page post
– Answers a question you’ve asked
– Responds to your event
76. More Post Metrics
• Negative Feedback: Number of times users have
clicked the “x” button, clicked “hide,” clicked
“hide all” or reported your Page posts as spam
• Post Consumers: The number of unique users
who clicked anywhere in your post
• Post Consumptions: The number of clicks
anywhere in your post
• Post Engaged Users: The number of unique users
engaged with your post. Engagement includes
any click or story created.
Let’s now turn our attention towards Reach.
Page Reach: The number of unique users who have seen any content associated
with your Page (including any Ads or Sponsored Stories pointing to your Page). The
Page Reach number might be less than the impressions number since one person
can see multiple impressions.
Similar to Impressions, Reach can also be Organic, Paid or Viral
Engagement from other users also factors into the posted weight. So a plain text update with multiple likes and comments can carry more combined weight than a photo post with no engagement despite the initial weight of the post
How quickly the post loses value, or “decays” is also dependent on the facebook user. If you only log in once a week, stories that are a few days old still have a chance of appearing on your newsfeed
If you’ve ever used an internet forum or message board before, you’ll notice that Facebook’s concept of ‘story bump‘ is very similar to the process of ‘bumping’ a post on a forum. A post on a message board gets ‘bumped’ each time a person interacts with said post. Each interaction makes the post rise back up to the top of the message board. You can imagine that very compelling, popular and controversial posts are often commented on the most, therefore they are constantly being ‘bumped’ and remain at the top of the message board
If you’ve been liking and commenting statuses from your new coworker or best friend (or sharing posts from your favorite restaurant’s Facebook page), Facebook will push those posts up higher in News Feed.
Exporting data opens up a wealth of new reports.
For instance we can see demographic data in detail.
Similar with other metrics such as negative feedback.
Exporting the data give you the flexibility to really explore your stats and answer meaningful questions like “when is the best time to post?”
You can use this data to see when your fans are online. How you use it is up to you. You could compare weekend to weekdays to see optimise your posting schedule & strategy. Here we can see a strong and clear difference between weekend & weekday behaviour.
Page Stories: The number of stories created about your Page. Stories include:
Page Consumptions: The total number of clicks on any of your content. Consumptions include link clicks, photo clicks, video plays and other clicks.
Clicks generating stories are included in “Other Clicks.” Stories generated without clicks on page content (e.g., liking the page in Timeline) are not included.
Post Impressions, Reach etc are exactly the same as the Page example except in that they relate to your posts rather than overall content. So we’ll leave those aside for now.