FACEBOOK REPORT

Making a Facebook report of your campaigns is an essential step to understanding where and how you are doing, plus it is something that your boss will certainly ask you for sooner or later.

Let us, therefore, look at how to prepare an accurate and comprehensive Facebook report, enabling you to obtain all the information you need in a professional manner. We talk about KPIs (key performance indicators) to identify the key data to be analyzed.

Which tools to use for a Facebook report?

There are two Facebook reporting tools that allow you to monitor the performance of your posts and campaigns: one is Insights, and the other is the Facebook Ad Manager in the Business Manager.

The first is free and monitors the progress of all posts on your page. The second is also free, of course, but only monitors the paid posts you have decided to publish.

Which one to use, then? For an accurate Facebook report, the right answer is both! Of course, this answer is not always true because, as we said, if you do not invest resources on your Facebook page, you only need to use Insights.

Beware though! It is only right that I go off-topic for a moment to make a dutiful clarification: Facebook’s algorithm is extremely penalizing for so-called “business” or “commercial” pages. The good Zuckerberg’s social network thrives on advertising; it relies on this concept (as he himself stated), so why show your posts and campaigns to the social network if you don’t pay?

You will notice or have already noticed, that there is a huge difference in the results of a post put up, thus investing money in it, and one that instead stoically wants to fend for itself. There, now you are warned, if you don’t believe me, I invite you to do some testing.

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Creating a Facebook report with Insights: the 8 main functions

Once you have entered your page, you can find the Insights link at the top of the main menu. You will now have all the data you need to make a Facebook report. Let’s take a look at the main items one by one.

Overview

This is the section that appears as soon as you access Facebook Insights. Here you can get a general idea of how your page is performing. Crucial for you will be selecting the time frame in which you want to have data on your operations. Always pay attention to this aspect; submitting a report from the wrong time period could be a nasty slip!

In addition to some tables, which we will discuss in detail in a moment, there is a feature that may be interesting: you can add your competitors’ fan pages to see what they are achieving and how they are doing. Useful tool!

I like it

Here you can see how many followers your page has lost or gained over a given period of time. Within this section, there are 4 other entries, all of which are intuitive except for one: “Net Likes”. From this TAB, you can see the trend of your likes day by day, which is useful for understanding how you gain or lose fans in relation to the actions you take.

Results

In this section, you will see the number of people who have viewed your content. Be careful though: being viewed is not the same as being read! Here you can see the trend in the coverage of your organic and sponsored posts, shown in a graph using 2 different colors, and you can also see the reactions of fans to your posts.

Are reactions important in Facebook reports? Very! From here, you understand how viral your post can become: a lot of shares means increasing the organic potential of your content; comments perform the same function albeit in a more restrained way; ditto for likes.

You can also monitor those actions that can be considered negative such as: hide a post, hide all posts, mark as spam, dislike.

Page views

In this section, you will be able to analyze how many times your Fan Page has been viewed, obtain demographic data and where these people follow you from, understand where they came to your page from, and so on.

Actions on the page

Knowing which actions are most used by users is a big help in order to have a complete Facebook report. In this section, you can see the following:

• Actions in total on the page, i.e., the number of actions users performed on the page, such as clicking on the directions button, phone number, website, etc.
• People who clicked on the invitation to action: who clicked on the invitation button also found out how many times this action was repeated and when.
• People who clicked on Directions: this is a useful action to understand how interested the customer may be in ‘touching’ what you are advertising or offering.
• People who clicked on the phone number. Hearing a voice on the other end of the phone is still important to many users.
• People who clicked on the website. An action that, especially for e-commerce, is certainly desirable.

Post

Post statistics are very important as they give you a measure of which content is most liked by your audience. This is perhaps the most important insight of all Facebook Insights metrics. Understanding what is liked can help you optimize your creative and communications for better and better results.

Another highlight in this section is the indication of when your fans are online, a piece of information you can use to post at the right times and on the right days.

Video

In the video section, you can measure the performance of your videos. The characteristics of this data are the same as those seen in posts. Unlike posts, however, there is the possibility to see how much time users have spent watching your video.

Audience

Finally, in the people section, you can better understand who your fans are.

Here you have a very accurate collection of their characteristics, which I obviously recommend you study in order to convey your advertising campaigns. Knowing their generalities, gender, and where they connect from is an important card in your hands, also for making new marketing proposals to your boss or team. Here you will see how many people you have reached, i.e., who have seen your post, and the people involved, i.e., who have interacted with your content.

Ad Manager: Facebook reports from Business Manager

Let us, therefore, enter pure Facebook ADS. Investing in Facebook is now necessary for business and commercial pages. As we said, the Facebook algorithm does not help those who do not pay; on the contrary, we can even say that it penalizes them.

A post that, in organic terms, would reach a few hundred people can, with a good campaign, reach thousands of users for a few euros. With this in mind, Business Manager should be activated on your page.

From the “Ad Management” panel of the Business Manager, you can access the advertising report section, i.e., a Facebook report focusing on the results of your paid campaigns. Please note that from here, you cannot see those posts that are not sponsored! So let’s see in detail how to go about extracting the right data for a good Facebook report from Business Manager.

Manage your evaluation metrics

In contrast to the more common use of Insights, Business Manager allows you to decide for yourself which data you want to monitor, such as cost per click (CPC) or coverage. To access these options, all you have to do is click on the metrics menu on the left of the page and tick those parameters that are of interest to you and your campaign. You can select pre-set Facebook reports, or you can customize and save your own.

There are indeed many metrics available in Business Manager. To help you get started, I have grouped and selected the most important and in-depth metrics. Obviously, the choice of Facebook report metrics depends on the objective of your campaign. If you always use the same ones, something is wrong with your strategy.

• Performance: results, coverage, frequency, impressions, people taking action, positive and negative feedback, money spent, etc.
• Interactions: Post Engagement, Post Comments, Post Shares, Page Engagement, Page Likes, Mentions, Events, etc.
• Clicks: link clicks, unique links, CTR, etc.
• Messaging: new messaging conversations, replies, cost per conversation, etc.
• Average: average video viewing time, 3-second video views, 10-second video views, 30-second video views, 25% video viewing, 100% video viewing, etc.
• Website conversions: website leads, website searches, website cart additions, website registrations completed, cost per website purchase, etc. For this section, it is imperative to activate the Facebook pixel on your site.
• Apps: desktop app installations, actions from mobile apps, additions to cart from mobile devices, mobile app purchases, etc.
• On-Facebook: purchases on Facebook, cost per purchase on Facebook, etc.
• Offline: shop visits, offline purchases, offline additions to cart, cost for offline purchases, etc.

Where are the pre-set metrics?

Should you decide to initially entrust your Facebook reports to pre-set metrics, all you have to do is click on the hamburger next to “All Reports”, and from there, you will be spoilt for choice!

Which metrics to choose?

Obviously, I cannot list all the metrics possibilities that are offered; the advice I can give you is to focus on what you really need to know, at which point you choose the best options for your Facebook report.

 

Clearly, if your goal is to get more conversions on your e-commerce site, then you will have to try to understand how many conversions your campaign generated, through which adverts they arrived, which target group bought, where people who did not complete the purchase stopped, and so on.

Surely you are not curious to know how many people have sent you a private message in Messenger!

How to save and automate Facebook reports

Another, in my opinion, outstanding aspect of the reports made by Business Manager is the possibility of saving and scheduling them. Having automatisms, in this case, can be extremely useful and can save you a lot of time that you can devote to other aspects of your communication on social.

Saving and scheduling your Facebook reports is very easy: once you have set the metrics you want to use, simply click save, give your report a name, and select how often you want to receive information from the drop-down menu below. Easy no?!

How to analyze Facebook report data

There are data that are simpler to interpret and others that are, so to speak, more complex. It is easy to see, for example, whether your fan base is increasing or decreasing, and the reason for this is often the relationship between the number of posts you publish and the quality of those posts.

Posting a lot but having content of little interest will definitely drive people away from your page. Conversely, posting less but giving more weight to content will build loyalty and attract fans to your page.

However, when you invest in Facebook ads, things change. This is because you have to realize whether the investment you have made has returned what you expected. First of all, you have to ask yourself what your goal is: to acquire fans, to make more conversions, to move people to your site, to get video views, etc. Once you know what your goal is, you can more coherently analyze the data at your disposal.

Practical example on cost per click (CPC)

I want to help you with an example. I am a retailer of customized magic wands (forgive me, I saw “Fantastic Beasts” a few days ago), and my goal is to bring as many people as possible to my site to make myself known. I decide to invest 200€ in sponsoring my post.

At the end of the campaign, I saw that 2500 people clicked on the link to my website. This means that my CPC is 0.08€. As an interesting side data, I recorded the fact that some people contacted me and that I sold 3 sticks for a total of 150€.

How do you rate the investment? The investment is absolutely good, and I will now explain why. My goal was to get visits to my site, and I succeeded by spending 8 cents per person. True, I did not amortize the investment, but that was not what I wanted to get out of my sponsorship. So my Facebook report will tell me that the balance is absolutely positive.

When is the CPC to be considered expensive?

In a Facebook report, the CPC should not exceed 0.10€ on average. But even this is not entirely true. If I were a dealer of extra-luxury cars, my target group would be very niche. Clearly, then I would expect the CPC to be higher. Also, consider that if a retailer of magic wands earns an average of €50/€70 per wand, I, a retailer of extra-luxury machines, average a few hundred thousand.

To sum up, the CPC must be proportionate to the profit of the product I am going to sell. One piece of advice I would give you is to analyze the performance of your advertisement time after time, trying to understand when and how you managed to spend less. Sometimes creativity makes the difference, and sometimes the text; in other cases, you may have changed something in the selection of your target audience.

Facebook reports are useful not only for your boss but also for you to understand how to optimize your budget.

ROI: what it is, how important it is, and how to measure it

Getting a budget and approval from your employer is something you can achieve by demonstrating how your activities contribute to the achievement of business goals. Facebook must bring a return on investment, i.e., ROI. Let’s look at a specific case. To calculate the ROI, you can apply this formula:

Profit/investment x 100 = ROI of social media (in percent)

Let’s apply the formula! If you got EUR 500 in revenue from Facebook with an investment of EUR 200, your profit would be EUR 300. So taking these figures into our formula: 500€ profit / 200€ investment x 100 = 250% profitability, this is the value of your ROI!

How to set ROI goals

As we said in the previous paragraphs, goals are not always related to earning money; they can also be set on brand awareness rather than coverage. The important thing you should remember is to always set measurable and verifiable goals; that way, you can always demonstrate your results.

Generally, the most commonly used metrics for calculating ROI in Facebook reports are:

• Reach
• Public Engagement
• Site traffic
• Generated leads
• Registrations and conversions
• Revenue generated.

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Mistakes you might make in the Facebook report

I think the most common one is the choice of time frame to be analyzed. Always make sure that the dates you enter are correct; you cannot examine data that refer to the wrong time frame!

Pay attention to the frequency. It is a figure that tells you how many times the same person has seen your advertisement on average. Showing the same ad over and over again to the same user wastes resources for you and makes him lose patience!

Do not get creative with text that takes up more than 20% of the image, or you will be penalized.

It is worth setting up your campaigns with a daily budget logic; that way, if you see that an advertisement is going badly, you can switch it off immediately; otherwise, if it is going well, you might even consider increasing your investment.

Don’t focus your attention on just one metric; try to have an overview to better understand the reasons that drive your campaign toward success or failure.

Are there more important KPIs?

There are KPIs (key performance indicators) that it is always important to analyze for your Facebook reports. Around them, as we said, other metrics change on a case-by-case basis.

• Engagement rate: i.e., the number of interactions generated by each individual post in relation to the number of page likes.
• Coverage: how many people reached our posts overall.
• People: who follows you, who interacts, where they do it from, on which days, who buys, etc.
• CPC: it is obviously crucial to understand how much you spend.

With reports, you can monitor your marketing strategy on Facebook. Attend a course to understand the best way to refine your strategies.

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