[The following is a guest post from John Haydon of JohnHaydon.com.]
Facebook Insights for Pages provides critical data about activity around your Page (such as when someone Likes your Page) and activity around your Page updates (such as when users comment on or Like one of your Page stories).
Facebook Insights is essentially your GPS device to point you towards marketing success on Facebook.
Facebook breaks down its analytics into five reports:
- The Overview Report: An overview of how your Page is performing day to day, with sortable post-level details.
- The Likes Report: A report about the Facebook users who Like your Page.
- The Reach Report: A report about the Facebook users who see your Page content (organic, viral and paid reach), what websites are referring traffic to your Page, and more.
- The Talking About This Report: A report about the Facebook users who create content about your Page, and how those stories generate viral reach.
- The Check Ins Report: A report about the Facebook users who checkin to your Facebook Place on their mobile device.
Going beyond Facebook Insights
The five reports listed above provide more than enough data to navigate towards most destinations.
However, there are times when you want more insight (pun intended) around your Page and how Facebook users are interacting with your content. This is precisely why Facebook allows you to do a full data dump (up to an 89-day range).
Following are examples of some of the data points unavailable in the Insights reports that you can view by Exporting data:
Page Level Data:
- The number of people each day who saw your Page content
- The number of people each day who engaged with your Page
- The number of people each week who engaged with your Page
- The number of stories each day created about your Page
- The number of stories created about your Page over the past 28 Days
- The number of people each day who liked your Page who are also friends with current fans
- A breakdown of how people have liked your Page each day (through a like box, on the page, in a hover card, etc.)
- The number of people each day who saw your Page or its posts from a story published by a friend.
- The number of times each day or each week that were seen now News Feed tickers.
- Data on post impressions. Impressions are the number of times a post is displayed, whereas reach is the number of people that saw those posts.
Post Level Data:
- Date and time an update was published
- The number of people who saw your post in a story from a friend.
- The total number of impressions each post received.
- The number of people who gave negative feedback on your post.
- The number of people who hid your post.
- The number of people who reported your post as spam.
- The number of fans who saw your post.
- The number time your post was displayed to fans.
- The number of stories about your post by fans.
How to export your Page Insights
You can export either Page level or Post level data from your Page Insights simply by clicking the Export button on the top-right corner of any of your Insights tabs, and selecting Page level or Post level data, the date rangeyou wish to analyze, and the format for your export (as shown above). Insights data is not available before July 19, 2011.
Finally, check out the awesome template Jon Loomer created to make insights data more actionable.
John Haydon is the founder of Inbound Zombie, a social media strategy firm in Massachusetts that helps non-profits increase awareness, amplify engagement, and get more donations online. He’s also a partner at SocialBrite, an instructor for Charityhowto and Marketing Profs University, the author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies and a public speaker and presenter.
