With Facebook boasting more than 2.6 billion monthly active users, as well as a workplace collaboration suite to compete with the likes of Slack, its stranglehold on social and business communications is almost unparalleled.
Facebook’s dominance in the social media space is part of the reason it has become of the most efficient ways to generate an audience for your business, whether it’s in content creation or the restaurant industry. This is why one of the keys to growing your business in the modern age is appreciating how to use Facebook, and what role it can play whether you’re starting out a new venture, or looking to scale-up.
Facebook Analytics is the central pillar for how businesses can effectively use Facebook, offering users the capacity to make informed decisions around marketing strategies by using a rich pool of customer data. The information provided by users interacting with your posts and content, from their age, location and gender to their interests, allows you to truly understand your target demographic and cater your strategy towards their needs.
While Google Analytics offers a sophisticated set of tools for businesses to manage the users visiting their sites, the analytics capabilities offered by Facebook have quickly become a more popular alternative, if not a complementary tool. It’s especially important for businesses with the need to build a strong social media presence as part of their growth and marketing strategies.
What does Facebook Analytics do?
This was first released as an application-based analytics platform to help third-party developers understand how people were using their software and services. Only a small proportion of data was ever shared with developers in these early stages of Facebook Analytics, however, and insights we're unable to provide details about the types of people using these services.
A year after its rollout, Facebook Analytics was upgraded to offer cross-platform analytics, allowing organisations to collect data about those using their applications and websites they owned, across multiple devices.
Now, businesses could see how its users were interacting with more than just apps, but also on the platform as a whole, as well as how they were using bots within the Messenger app. If a user had dismissed the bot, they could try and ascertain why this may have happened and tweak the tech as a result.
As the social network began adding more and more features to its platform, it made the decision in 2017 to rebrand Facebook Analytics for Apps as Facebook Analytics, during the company's F8 conference.
"We're extending omni-channel analytics for Facebook's family of apps and services with the addition of Facebook Page interactions, such as post reactions and shares, so you can measure and understand the interactions people have with your Page alongside their other activity on your website, app, and bot," said Amit Finkelstein, engineering manager of Facebook Analytics, in a blog post at the time.
"For example, an e-commerce business can measure if people who comment on an item featured in their Page post go on to view an item on their website, or purchase it in their app. The ability to view customer behaviour across different channels gives businesses a unique ability to learn about and optimize their full customer journey to drive growth.
"We're also giving you the ability to see how people's online interactions translate to in-store purchases with the addition of support for offline conversions. By closing the loop between your online and offline channels, you won't have to wonder if people browsing items on your website translates into sales in your physical store."
At last year's F8 Conference, Facebook once more unveiled a catalogue of enhancements, including the Journeys feature, which has been designed to bring together different data points to work out a user's journey and touchpoints on Facebook.
The company also introduced machine learning to help advertisers automatically detect the most frequent routes a user takes within an app or site, and the tool now has a full-fledged mobile app available on iOS and Android. With the platform's scope widening, Facebook Analytics for Apps was ultimately rebranded to Facebook Analytics at the company's F8 conference in 2017.
How can businesses get value from Facebook Analytics?
The main idea of Facebook Analytics is to give organisations a better understanding of who engages with their brand and how they do it. Facebook provides a treasure trove of user information and its analytics platform allows businesses to gain almost unparalleled levels of insight into their customers, whether that be where they live, how old they are, their gender, or even the device they use to access the internet most regularly.
While it's generally up to an individual business how it derives value from all this data, one of the most recommended uses is to create targeted advertising from analytical data based on user habits and their activity history.
Staying ahead of the game in the world of data
Create successful marketing campaigns by understanding your customers better
"If you rely on Facebook ads to attract customers, it's important to have a way to track them," advises Hootsuite's Ad Espresso blog. "Blindly spending money on Facebook ads without any insight into their effectiveness is a waste of time and effort. If you're not tracking the results, you'll never know if your campaigns are generating a return on investment."
Facebook's Finklestein, meanwhile, says the tool can also help track a customer journey across multiple platforms, thanks to its multi-channel monitoring feature.
"For example, an e-commerce business can measure if people who comment on an item featured in their Page post go on to view an item on their website, or purchase it in their app," Finklestein says. "The ability to view customer behaviour across different channels gives businesses a unique ability to learn about and optimise their full customer journey to drive growth."
"We're also giving you the ability to see how people's online interactions translate to in-store purchases with the addition of support for offline conversions. By closing the loop between your online and offline channels, you won't have to wonder if people browsing items on your website translates into sales in your physical store."
Facebook Analytics competes with Google Analytics by linking actions to users rather than cookies, which allows businesses to trace a specific user across all of their browsers and devices when signed on to Facebook. Google Analytics, however, uses cookies that only let businesses track users in a single browser.
For those not running an e-commerce business, Facebook Analytics can help track social interactions, enabling businesses to increase social engagement and adapt posts according to what has worked in the past (and what hasn't).
Overall, Facebook Analytics is a powerful tool that can be used to increase ROI, and any business with a Facebook presence would be well advised to add this to their analytics toolbox.
