What You Need to Know about Facebook Analytics
Facebook has maintained a social media position of dominance for advertisers. Its platform, tools and features are second to none. Yet, despite raising the bar on social media advertising, e-commerce, retail and fashion digital marketing teams are always asking for more data, more insights and new ways to extend their Facebook marketing dollars. Now, with the addition of Facebook Analytics, advertisers have a new set of metrics to leverage across their digital campaigns.
Facebook Analytics
Facebook is pushing its analytics as a powerful behavioral analytics solution that can empower advertisers to measure, understand, and optimize their customers’ experiences. Facebook’s two billion users provide advertisers with rich insights that go beyond standard demographics. Those users provide invaluable real-time data that can be leveraged across multiple devices, channels, and platforms. Unfortunately, most Facebook advertisers aren’t aware that they have access to this powerful tool.
Think about all the ways users interact with Facebook. Think about apps, Messenger, Facebook pages and chat-bots. Advertisers can map out their buyer journeys for multiple customer segments, buyer personas and demographics. Ultimately, using Facebook Analytics provides a more complete picture of that buyer’s journey. That journey can be defined across mobile devices, tablets, laptops, computers, apps and Facebook Messenger. That data is invaluable to advertisers because it provides real-time intelligence that helps advertisers define what customers want and when they want it.
Real-Time Data Source
The beauty of the Facebook Analytics platform is that it constantly rounds out your audience’s makeup. Your personas are constantly updated, and you have the information you need to stay the course or pursue a new strategy. Your customers are telling you what they think of your product or service right this very moment. It's up to you to listen to what they have to say.
Invaluable Insights
With Facebook Analytics, you know where customers are in real-time, what they buy, when they buy, and why they buy, and you know exactly what they think of those purchases. Today’s customers build brands alongside the company’s they love. That relationship needs to be constantly nurtured and Facebook Analytics provides e-commerce enterprises and digital marketing teams with all the Facebook insights they need to increase customer engagement.
All Advertisers Have Access to Facebook Analytics
You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company or a large advertiser with a large marketing spend on Facebook to leverage the social media giant's analytics tool. The tool is open to everyone. However, you must have the Facebook Pixel installed on your site. From here you should implement different standard events to track the different kinds of conversions through your site.
Purchase, lead, complete registration, payment info, initiate checkout, add to cart, add to wishlist, search and view content are the nine different events you’re able to implement. The more events you have installed, the more you’ll be able to track every customer action taken although not every standard event may be applicable to you. It’s important to note that custom conversions will not track through Facebook Analytics.
Facebook Features
There is a plethora of Facebook features for e-commerce, retail, and fashion advertisers to leverage. For example, you can identify high traffic periods. You can then link that data to specific content you’ve launched or advertising strategies you’ve employed. Advertisers can also look at Google Analytics data like time on page, traffic sources, search sources, referrer domains and most popular pages and URLs.
You can also drill down on different demographics. You can easily define the age, sex and ethnicity of your customers, in addition to understanding what kind of devices they prefer. Identifying traffic sources from different demographics and devices helps you to identify why and when a given content piece works best on social media. Those insights might help you identify how a specific offer appealed to a specific audience or segment. These demographics can also be used to increase user retention by keeping more customer engaged with your site. Here are some additional features to leverage.
Create Cohorts: This feature allows you to create cohorts, which are groups of people who perform two events during a given period. This allows you to define how many people viewed your content before purchasing.
Create Event Source Groups (ESGs): This powerful tool allows you to group event sources like an app, pixel, or page together to give you omnichannel analytics and insights. This gives you a complete view of your customer’s journey across multiple channels and different devices.
Revenue: Advertisers can segment their revenue for different buyer personas by total revenue, unique purchasers, average revenue per user and number of purchases per user. Further insights can be gleaned by identifying key revenue-generating actions that coincide with different events and activities.
Funnels: You can set up funnels that allow you to improve your conversion rates for registrations, checkouts and purchases by identifying how, when and where you’re losing prospects. You can then determine how many people arrived onsite, initiated checkout and ended up purchasing. Or, you can determine how long it took them to make that purchase or what roadblocks your users are encountering and why they’re abandoning pursuit.
Customer Engagement: There are several data sources that provide invaluable insight into comments, shares, reactions and messages. You can identify specific users who are taking actions across multiple channels and devices.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The greatest insight comes from being able to define CLV on multiple customer segments and groups. You can define how initial interactions lead to that first purchase and how many of those customers returned. You can segment this data daily, weekly or monthly.
There is so much more available through Facebook Analytics. The above only scratches the surface. The tool will be refined as more users and brands leveraging the platform. While it can be daunting at first, it's essential to get accustomed to the tool. Start now by familiarizing yourself with the analytics and you'll be set for the future.
If you want to start scaling your Facebook advertising but need help with the preparation and execution, read this helpful ebook: The Ultimate Guide to Scaling Your E-Commerce Advertising.
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