2013 saw a number trends when it comes to online marketing, one of which has been an increased demand for more in-depth website analytics for split testing and general performance monitoring. In response to this trend, Facebook has overhauled its Facebook Insights interface to include more information about how fans interact with Facebook fan pages.
Facebook began testing the new Page Insights early in 2013 with a select group of page owners before rolling it out to everyone else in October. The developer team has been tweaking the new interface ever since so that it includes all-new features and improvements.
Main Differences: The goal of the overhaul was to make Page Insights a more useful tool to Page owners as far as growth measurement goes. The most notable differences are:
- Simplified Metrics: The “People Talking About This” (PTAT) metric has been split into more detailed sections: Page Likes, People Engaged (the number of unique clicks, likes, comments, or shares for a post), Page tags and mentions, Page check-ins, and other interactions. It’s worth noting that these changes to PTAT are only on the back-end, and PTAT will still appear as a public-facing metric.
- Scoring Content: Positive and negative interactions are now aggregated into a score card for each specific post to help Page owners decide which content performs the best and worst on their page.
- New “People” Metric: You can view demographic information about your page viewers in the “People” section.
- New Page Insights Export: Facebook has added a new template to for those wishing to export their Insights data, though the old export option is also still available for now.
APIs associated with the old Facebook Insights will still remain the same, and the Facebook Developer team is working to create new APIs to make the new Insights easier to track.
Admin Panel: Some people will still see the old admin panel when they access their Facebook page. You can reach the new interface by clicking the “Check out the new Page Insights” link in the “Insights” box.
The new Insights is now divided into six sections: Overview, Likes, Reach, Visits, Posts, and People.
Overview: The Overview section is a summary of the Page Likes, Post Reach, and Engagement sections. The page replaces the old Admin Panel with more detailed information about engagement. You can also view the performance of your previous five posts from this screen.
Likes: At the top of the Likes page you’ll find a graph which represents your Page Likes between two given dates that you can choose. Below that you’ll find Total Page Likes as of Today, and the very precise Net Likes feature. Your Net Likes are your un-likes subtracted from your likes over the previous thirty days. You can also view organic Likes (Likes that come from unpaid traffic) vs. paid Likes (Likes that come from page promotion and PPC campaigns). There is also a graph that shows you whether your Likes came from page suggestions or on the page itself.
Reach: Your overall post reach can be viewed at the top of the page. You can toggle between the past week, the past month, the past quarter, or you can choose custom dates. As you change the dates of the master graph, it reflects in the other graphs on the page, including the Post Reach graph. This graph gives you a more detailed view of your overall post reach.
There is a Likes, Comments, and Shares graph, as well as a Hide, Report as Spam, and Unlikes graph. The Total Reach graph reflects the number of people who saw any activity from your page including posts, posts by other people, Page like ads, mentions, and checkins.
Visits: As with the Reach page, you can toggle the dates at the top of the visits page so that the changes reflect in all of the graphs. Page and Tab Visits shows The number of times each of your Page tabs was viewed. Other Page Activity shows the number of actions people took that involved your Page. The External Referrers graph shows the number of times people came to your Page from a website aside from Facebook (e.g, from Google search or any page you have back linked from).
Posts: The Posts section is divided into two tabs: “When Your Fans are Online” and “Post Types.” Under the first tab, you can see your total post views for each of the past seven days. The graph below that breaks the day down hour by hour so that you see when your fans are online. This information can give you an idea of the ideal times to update your page with a new post.
Under “All Posts Published” you can see the performance of your most recent posts. To go into more detail, click the “Post Types” tab. This shows the success of different post types based on average reach and engagement. This feature is meant to help Page owners decide what types of content perform best with their fans.
People: This section tells you the demographic information of the people who have Liked your page, including gender, country, city, age, and language.
Facebook is continuing to make adjustments to Insights based on feedback from Page owners, so for now you can expect ongoing changes to this feature. Overall, Page Insights is shaping up to be a very useful tool for page owners to monitor the progress of their Facebook pages, especially those with large or growing audiences.
