Track 5 Metrics To Optimize Your Facebook Campaigns

All of Facebook’s metrics can be accessed through your businesses page within the ‘insight’ tab. From there, you can dive into the data your page has recorded and execute informed decisions on reforming your marketing strategy. You’re able to see when your followers are online which will help dictate what time and day is best to post, the demographics of your audience, your follower growth and so much more. But, which metrics should you be paying close attention to?

Engagement

This metric measures the number of times a user took action on your post, whether it be liking, sharing, commenting or clicking a link. This will indicate how users actually feel about the content in which you are posting. If your page has 5,000 followers but everything you post is only getting 5 likes – it will be clear that you need to go back to the drawing board.

This metric also plays a big part in Facebook’s algorithm, which is what determines where your posts will show up in users News Feed. The more your post is engaged with the more likely it’ll surface on your followers feed.

Reach

This shows you the number of users that saw your post on Facebook and will allow you to analyze both the organic and paid reach. This metric is important because let’s say you have 500,000 followers but you’ve only reached 1%, you’ll now know that you’ve been spending money and time focusing on content that no one is seeing.

An in-depth view of your pages reach is available in a separate tab of the insights page.

Likes and Follows

This metric allows you to see who “likes” your page and those who opted-in to have your posts be displayed on their News Feed – “followers.”  This metric can be seen directly on your page but a more in depth view is available within the insights tab. The in depth view will allow for you to see your page’s likes over time in addition to the number of ‘unlikes’ and a full breakdown of paid vs. organic likes.

Overtime your page likes should be growing, this is because it’s seen as a “vanity metric.” The likes don’t necessarily represent your marketing efforts success when compared to engagement and reach but if you’re not gaining likes you’re doing something wrong. This is why measuring like/follower growth is so important because ideally, you want to retain those you have and gain new ones, but without tracking you’ll be left in the dark.

Video Retention

This metric applies to those pages that are honing in on the growing popularity of Facebook videos.  As of January 2016, 100 million hours of video were watched on Facebook daily, so it’s clear that this form of digital marketing is skyrocketing. But, posting any old video won’t cut it; you need to ensure your content is enticing.

If your 3-minute video is only holding an audience to the minute mark, it’s clear that the content needs to be optimized. “Audience retention” can be viewed by going to the “post details” of your video and selecting the “video average watch time.”  (You can also view your videos engagement just like how you view other posts engagement.)

CTR (click-through rate)

Within Facebook Ads, you’ll see over 100 metrics that can be measured, but in truth you won’t be going through all these metrics. Now, each brand’s goals will dictate what metric is actually important to them but one that is consistently imperative is the CTR. This shows the percentage of people that see your ad and click on it, if your CTR is low that means users are seeing your ad but not taking action. Tracking this metric will help you determine if your content is engaging and also will allow you to have a higher ad’s relevance score.

As stated before, Facebook uses an algorithm when positioning posts on users News Feeds, so if your ad is receiving impressions but no clicks it will assume the audience is uninterested. Having a low CTR can result in paying more per click plus lead to overall poor performance.

In Conclusion

Facebook offers a plethora of metrics to analyze which can lead to the daunting task of deciding where to start in terms of data analyzation. Utilizing these 5 metrics will help you get a grasp on the basics of Facebook metrics. Once you analyze your metrics, it is suggested to address where your Facebook campaign strategy is struggling and from there, create a reformed strategy. But, be aware that tracking your campaigns is not a one time task, you should be regularly tracking your page’s performance to ensure you’re publishing content that will appeal to your audience and keep them interested.