Have you ever tried judging the performance of your Facebook posts but you left the Facebook Insights page even more confused than before?
Facebook provides us with a host of useful graphs and charts but we need to first learn what they mean and why they are important before we can draw significant conclusions from them.
Before we start, let’s first answer this important question…
What are KPIs and why is it important to track them?
KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are data points that represent how well your content is doing when it comes to accomplishing content marketing goals.
For example, if your goal is to reach as many people as possible with your new Facebook post, you should pay attention to KPIs that directly impact that goal.
Not all KPIs are created equal, however.
The idea is to focus on what gives the most bang for the buck, so to speak.
Managing your time efficiently and creating another post will always beat endlessly studying every bit of data Facebook allows you to track.
To that end, let’s talk about some of the important Facebook KPIs and situations you might find them useful in.
1. Reach
Facebook allows you to track paid and organic reach.
From the content marketing perspective, you’ll be more interested in the organic reach but you’ll have to track paid reach too if you’re using paid traffic, obviously.
Facebook’s organic reach is not what it used to be back in the day.
It’s sitting at around 5.5% of Page followers.
This doesn’t mean publishing new content on Facebook isn’t worth it, especially for established Pages with a lot of followers.
As someone who publishes content on Facebook, you should pay attention to reach because it’s important to be aware of how many people actually see your posts.
Facebook Insights offers estimates on:
- Post reach – the number of people who saw any of your posts at least once
- Story reach – the number of people who had your Page’s story on their screen
- Total reach – the number of people who saw any content from your Page or about your Page
Positive engagement like comments, likes, and shares amplify your reach while negative engagement like hides, report as spam, and unlikes decrease your organic post reach.
Why is it important to track and analyze the reach on Facebook?
Simply put, you want to know what content marketing types work best so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t work.
Important note: don’t confuse reach with impressions.
Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed regardless of if it was clicked on or not.
Facebook impressions are measured inside Facebook Ads Manager and are tied with the paid traffic side of things so don’t look for it in the page insights.
2. Actions on Page
Action on Page enables you to see four important click-related insights:
- People who clicked action button
- People who clicked Get Directions
- People who clicked phone number
- People who clicked website
For each of these data points, there’s a separate graph that further breaks down visitors by:
- Age and gender
- Country
- City
- Device
Actions on Page also shows you the Total actions on Page that happened in the set window of time.
Most businesses, local or online, can draw significant conclusions from the Action on Page section.
For example, the information on how many people clicked on Get Directions or phone number is invaluable to local businesses while knowing how many people clicked Website is everything for online businesses.
How you use this information depends on the goal of your Facebook Posts.
If your goal is to drive traffic to your website and you don’t see that happening on the Website Clicks graph, it’s time to change your approach.
Likewise, if you’re a local business and your goal is to get customers from your Facebook content marketing efforts but that’s not happening, it’s a sign you need to change something.
Doing some competitive analysis and testing out different types of content until you find what works is your best bet.
Don’t forget that Facebook allows you to add up to 5 pages to keep tabs on and shows you rudimentary stats like:
- Total page likes
- Increase/decrease percentage from last week
- Number of posts in the current week
- Total engagement in the current week
3. Engagement
Positive engagement like comments, likes, shares, and video views amplify the reach of your content.
Knowing what posts were well-received by your audience is important.
Likewise, knowing what posts were not so well received is perhaps equally as important.
Luckily, Facebook tracks and displays all the relevant engagement information for your viewing.
Video Engagement
Video posts get at least 59% more engagement than other post types.
Tracking how well your videos are doing is imperative when it comes to making the most out of your video content marketing efforts on Facebook.
Facebook allows you to see the total number of minutes viewed as well as the number of 3-second video views in a set period of time.
A 3-second video view means just that, a view where the viewer spent at least 3 seconds with your video, or close to the entirety of the video if the video is shorter than 3 seconds.
Facebook also allows you to break down 3-second video views into organic and paid traffic which is very useful if you’re using both.
Facebook also enables you to see your highest-performing videos by minutes viewed and the number of 3-second video views in a set window of time.
When you click on one of your videos in the Top videos section, you can see details like:
- Peak Live Viewers (highest number of concurrent viewers)
- Minutes Viewed
- Video Views
- 10-Second Views
- Video Average Watch Time
- Audience and Engagement
How can video engagement data inform your video content creation?
There are many angles from which you can analyze your videos and draw conclusions.
For example, if your video was viewed 10,000 times but there are only 500 10-second views, it means that your viewers are losing interest very fast.
Noticing a pattern of this kind of viewer behavior means you’re doing something in the intro part of your videos that’s off-putting or not engaging enough to make your viewers stay for longer.
The same goes for low average watch time.
If your video is 60 minutes long but the average watch time is under a minute, you have a problem.
Reactions, Comments & Shares
You can see this graph under “Reach” and it shows the number of times that people reacted to your posts through likes, comments, shares, and more.
These actions represent positive user engagement and it helps your posts reach more people organically.
Drawing useful conclusions from positive user engagement is a balancing act.
On the one hand, you want to keep tabs on how well your posts are doing to see what your audience finds useful and engaging, but on the other hand, you don’t want to pander to these stats and let it overly influence what kind of content you put out.
It’s really easy to pigeon hole yourself into publishing the same type of content over and over again if you start chasing likes and comments.
This tactic can have short-term benefits, but it can harm your content marketing long-term goals.
Likes
Likes are another Facebook KPI that is useless if you look at it from a vanity perspective but it can be a meaningful signal of how well your content is doing if you take a deeper look at it.
Facebook Insights lets you track three different statistics of varying levels of usefulness when it comes to Likes.
The first one is the “Total Page Likes as of Today.”
This piece of data is not particularly useful and I wouldn’t pay much attention to it.
The second graph breaks down Page Likes into organic and paid Page Likes and it also shows the Unlikes.
This graph is moderately useful because it lets you measure your organic content marketing efforts against your paid marketing efforts.
Perhaps the most useful KPI that this graph offers is the Unlikes.
Third, and last, the graph in this section is the one that lets you know where the Page Likes happened.
For example, your Page Likes could happen:
- On your page
- In the search
- In the ads
- In page suggestions
- In the news feed
- Or they could even be restored likes from reactivated accounts
Knowing where your likes happened is useful on many different levels.
It tells you where your audience is consuming your content and enables you to calibrate your content marketing efforts to accomplish Facebook-related goals more effectively.
4. Growth
Looking past the vanity metrics associated with it, growth is a very important Facebook KPI for content marketers.
Basically, growth enables your products or services to get in front of new potential customers.
Caution: organic growth will not happen overnight on a platform like Facebook where organic reach has been lowered dramatically over the years.
You must be patient and accept the fact that you will have to work hard to grow your presence on Facebook organically.
To get the most insights out of growth metrics such as followers, reach, page views, or video views, it’s a good idea to break them down to:
- Daily growth
- Weekly growth
- Monthly growth
This will ensure that you can tie the results back to the actions you took.
For example, if you go hard for a week where you post multiple times per day and you keep track of the important KPI’s, you’ll be able to assess your efforts much more thoroughly for that week.
You’ll gain a better understanding of what content performed better or worse than expected and what exactly contributed to the growth of your page.
Without keeping track, you end up having to rely on guesswork and intuition which might stunt your growth or lead you astray completely.
5. Demographics
Remember how Facebook allows you to see who viewed your page by age and gender, country, city, and device?
You can find this information under Page insights.
This information can help you understand who your audience is.
And once you better understand who your audience is, you’ll better understand how to help them solve their problems.
This section is particularly important if you want to focus on a very specific audience either by age, gender, or location.
By taking a quick look at this information, you’ll be able to tell if you’re actually reaching your target audience or you need to change your approach.
6. Reach by Post Type
Look for this section under Posts.
Reach by Post Type is a very useful section that allows you to see which post types are doing well and which are underperforming.
For example, you might learn that one video post you published a few months back did amazingly well and received an above-average reach and engagement.
In a situation like that, you’d want to publish more video posts and see what happens.
You might find that video content resonates much better with your audience than text-based content.
This is just a hypothetical example but the key takeaway from looking at Reach by Post Type is to learn what works so you can do more of it.
7. Negative Feedback
Types of negative feedback on Facebook are Hide, Report as Spam, and Unlikes.
You can find this section under Reach.
No one likes negative feedback but negative feedback is one of the most valuable tools to help you create more relevant and useful content.
Monitoring this section will help you keep your finger on the
The important thing is not to take negative feedback to heart and get crippled by it.
The trick is to take it into account but not allow it to stop you from creating more content.
Conclusion
Getting the most bang for your buck out of your content marketing efforts is so important in the hyper-competitive world of online marketing.
Taking an hour or two every couple of months to judge the effectiveness of your Facebook posts will pay dividends in the long run.
Take into account the 7 crucial Facebook KPIs discussed in this article so you can learn what works and do more of it.