Facebook completely overhaul Page Insights – full tour

Yesterday Facebook sent live their ‘people talking about’ feature, but just this morning they have announced the launch of a complete overhaul of Page Insights. The changes are aimed at giving page owners as much information as possible about their fans, with the aim of optimising your page to keep fans there for longer, as well as repeating the kind of things that worked for your page. Page owners will be able to access a preview of the new Insights by navigating to your Insights and opting to see the new product, before it’s rolled out in full. Facebook Insights has always been a good product, considering it is available for free and to any page owner no matter the size, so what are they implementing that can help make it even better? And more importantly, what do the changes mean for you?

Friends of Fans

If you run Facebook advertising you’ll be familiar wit the option to target friends of fans. Essentially this means that your ad will only be shown to someone who has a friend who’s a fan. Now through Page Insights, you can see the total reach of ‘friends of fans’. This is an important number to keep an eye on, as you want to ensure that when someone engages with a piece of content on your Page, their friends are being alerted to it. It gives a more accurate reflection of your ‘ambient’ audience. I.e. those who might not be fans of your Page themselves (as this number excludes current fans) but who may have been exposed to your message :

People Talking About This

This is the most hyped feature that Facebook has introduced, and it gives you a figure for the time period that you select, of the number of times a post was generated about your Page, including links in personal profiles, or posts you’ve been tagged in :

Weekly Total Reach

When you go to a post on your Facebook Page you can see the individual number of impressions, but before you weren’t able to see this cumulatively. Now Facebook have introduced a feature to tell you weekly total reach, which is the number of times someone has been exposed to your Page, either through a post, a friend commenting, or through an ad. You’ll be able to see the percentage change over time, so if you see that your fans are going up but your reach is going down, you may need to think about creating more engaging content, so you get in front of more people organically :

How viral is a post?

Facebook ranks your posts in order of engagement, as they did before, but this has been massively expanded on, to show you a number of different metrics, which cover : Reach (the total number of people that saw your post) ; Engaged Users (people who interacted with the post in some way, such as clicking on the post in their newsfeed or leaving a comment ; Talking About This (the number of people who have created a ‘story’ from your post, such as leaving a reply or sharing with friends) ; Virality, which is slightly more complex. The ‘virality’ of your posts is expressed as a percentage of people that created a story about your post, against the total reach. Seeing your posts in this way allows you to see the content that clearly worked, or didn’t work :

You can then expand on a particular figure, to get more indepth insights. Clicking on ‘reach’ allows you to see a breakdown of whether that reach came directly from your Page activity, Facebook Ads, or whether it was viral (fans generating stories)

Clicking on ‘engaged users’s allows you to see : Other  clicks (clicks on other parts of the post, such as the name of the person that posted it) ; Link clicks (the number of clicks in a link on your post) ; the number of stories generated from your post, by fans :

Clicking on ‘talking about this’ allows people to see whether these stories generated were someone liking your post, or sharing your post :

Like Sources

Facebook included Like sources in the previous iteration of analytics, but this is now more advanced. This n number used to be fairly arbitrary as organic Like sources within Facebook were simply expressed as ‘unkonwn’ :

This has now been expanded on, so you get a much more accurate view of how people are not only finding your Page, but how they’re Liking it. Importantly, this is split down for the different functionalities within Facebook. So you can see for example how many Likes you’re getting as a result of another Page posting a link to your Page :

Demographic Reach

While Facebook will still give you access to the demographic breakdown of your fans, now they’re offering the ability to see the demographic breakdown of your active fans. This is showing you information on age, gender and location for anyone that was exposed to your content, whether they are a fan of your Page or not. As this gives a more accurate indication of who is actually engaging with your content, you might find that if the demographic breakdown here is different to your demographic breakdown of your fans, that you need to adjust your content to better suit these engaged fans :

How you reached people

This graph will allow you to plot different visits to your Page based on how people were exposed to it. If you find for example that most people are finding your Page through ads, then you need to improve the organic content and reach that you have :

You will also be able to see ‘unique users by frequency’. This is showing you the average number of times someone engaged with a piece of content. So you can see for example how many people you reached that were engaged with your content once, versus the number of people who were engaged with your content 3 times. This counts people that viewed your content, as opposed to commenting or Liking for example.

Talking About This

Within this new metric, you are also able to see a demographic breakdown of people who are talking about your Page by age, gender and location. Within this section, you can also compare your viral reach (the number of people who saw your Page), compared to ‘talking about this’ (the number of people who actively created a story). As reach just takes into account people that were exposed to your content, this figure will always be a lot higher than those people talking about it. Here you can choose which ‘story’ you want to compare, for example the number of times someone tagged you in a post or photo :

The new Page Insights are available for all Pages now, with an option to view them before they are rolled out as the default Insights for your Page.