Facebook Page Insights is a free service there to help answer your questions by providing page owners, administrators and developers with metrics centered around the content that is posted to the page.

Broad Metrics

If you want to know how many fans you have, you simply need to look at the number displayed on each page. Facebook has now applied a new metric to Pages which defines engagement. This is called ‘talking about this’ So you can now see how much engagement you and your competition have created.

This has huge implications because it now puts the focus on engaging with fans. Likes, shares and comments on the page all count towards this figure, however what many don’t realise is that this also includes other interactions such as check-ins, answers to questions, tagging and more. Most pages will reach less than 10% of their fans by simply churning out post after post of poor quality links that fans do not really want to see. With the creation of the Facebook ‘ticker’ it is very easy for fans to switch off notifications from your page in a couple of clicks if they feel you are spamming their news feed or providing too much unrelated or advertising content. By driving the focus more towards engagement with fans through content, page administrators will need to optimise their posts by focusing on what their fans really want to see.

Insights Dashboard

You can find your new Insights dashboard located on the main menu under your profile picture on the left-hand side. This is where you will find analytics for traffic and stories posted to your page. Data is only available to administrators of your page.

Clicking on the Insights tab will take you to your dashboard. Here you will see an overview of your pages performance over the last 28 days. Insights data should never be more than 48 hours old and Facebook will always announce if there is a problem collecting and serving data.


This overview includes analytics data based on the following metrics:

Total Likes The number of unique people who like your page.
Friends of Fans The number of unique people who are friends with people who like your page.
People Talking About This The number of unique people who have created a story about your Page. A story is created when someone likes your Page, posts to your Page Wall, likes, comments on or shares one of your posts, answers a question you posted, responds to your event, mentions your Page, tags your Page in a photo, checks in at your Place, or recommends your Place.
Weekly Total Reach The number of unique people who have seen any content associated with your Page in the previous week. This includes Ads and Sponsored Stories that point to your Page.

The timeline that runs along the horizontal axis of the graph also displays when you posted to your Page as large purple dots. The more you post in one day the larger these dots will appear. You can judge at a glance how effective any posts you made were towards your audience. The secret to success here is finding the posts that engaged the most users or reached the largest audience, then duplicating the outcome by creating a new unique post that should work equally well. To achieve this you need to look at your posts in more depth. You need only scroll down to the second part of your Insights dashboard.

Here we can view a list of all the posts that any administrator has made within the last 28 days to the Page wall. They are automatically sorted by date but you can click on a column to sort by reach, engagement, people talking about the post or the virality.
 

Reach The number of unique people who have seen your post.
Engaged Users The number of unique people who have clicked on your post.
Talking about this The number of unique people who have created a story from your Page post. Stories are created when someone likes, comments on, shares your post, answers a question you created or responds to an event.
Virality The percentage of people who have created a story from your page post out of the total number of unique people who have seen it.

The higher the virality percentage the more successful the post has been. Not necessarily by reaching a larger audience but by engaging the users that it did reach well. And this is what you should be focusing your social media efforts around.


Insights for Likes

Under the ‘Likes’ tab in your Insights menu you are provided the gender, age, demographics and location of all users who like your page. These include gender, age, country, city and language. You should use this information to understand exactly who your audience are so you can target your posts better.


Studying the information above we can see that 46% of the target audience are women aged between 25-54 and that 27 of the 68 UK fans live in London.

You can also see when your page was liked.

  • Was there a specific post that caused us to gain 5 likes in one day?
  • Can we duplicate this success?



Insights for Reach

The ‘Reach’ tab in your Insights menu will provide you with similar information as Insights for Likes. These include gender, age, country, city and language. There is also some extra data available here. The ‘Reach’ graph shows how many people saw any content about your Page in the previous 28 days and whether these people were reached through an organic, paid or viral channel. People might see your content through more than one of these channels, so the sum of your organic, paid and viral reach might be larger than your total Page reach. The Unique Users by Frequency chart shows how many people saw any content about your Page in the previous 7 days. It is broken down by how many times each person viewed the content during this time period.


You are also given such information as when and how many page views you received, how many unique page views you received, how many times each tab on your page was viewed (handy if you run iframe content through Wildfire or another third party application) and the domains of any external referrers outside of Facebook.


Insights for your Domain

You can also discover Insights for your own website by visiting the main Insights Dashboard and clicking on the green button named ‘Insights for your Domain’ as shown below. This does require placing a small piece of code, generated by Facebook, to your site working in a similar way to Google Analytics.

It is not necessary to take this action if you are only interested in Insights for your Facebook page.

 

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