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The lack of data about the actions of Facebook fans (and potential fans) is a point of frustration for many marketers. Previously, Facebook offered some basic analytics through its Insights application. But today, the social network giant turned its reporting dashboard into a real-time analytics tool.
As part of this update, businesses that are using Facebook Insights for websites will get distribution and engagement metrics related to their content's performance on Facebook in real-time. This new data will enable businesses to optimize content and adjust its placement based on performance.
Many marketers will be excited to know that the Facebook Insights update will also include more content-related metrics. For example, businesses will be able to look at impressions, referral clicks and the most popular stories on the site.
"Like" Button Analytics
For the first time, Facebook will provide data on the behavior the "Like" button triggers, including views, clicks and visits. Businesses will be able to use this data to test the impact of placement on "Like" button click-through rate.
Businesses that use any of the Facebook Social Pugins (Example: Recommendation Plugin located in the right sidebar of this blog) will be able to see performance metrics such as "Like" button impressions, rate of comments and a breakdown of interaction by demographic information. Additionally, the demographic details available to businesses will include age group, gender, language or location.
Marketing Takeaway
For businesses that rely on Facebook as a source of referral traffic to their websites, the new changes to Facebook Insights are exciting. These updates demonstrate how the Facebook platform is maturing. The first steps in leveraging these changes is to make sure that you have your website connected to Facebook Insights, click the big green box in the upper right corner.
Once you have your website attached to Insights and have started to receive data about the "Like" button and/or social plugin performance on your website, it is time to optimize. As you publish new content, look at the data in Facebook Insights to determine how it performs compared to past blog posts, for example. This information will help you tweak the topics you write about, the placement of your "Like" button and plugins as well as other content elements.
What do you think about these updates to Facebook Insights?
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