Top Facebook Metrics to Track

Nowadays, most businesses understand the importance of having a strong social presence. But, what most businesses still lack is a thorough, well-researched social strategy.

It’s not enough just to post, tweet or pin anymore, each action you take needs to be executed with an end goal in mind.

So, how exactly do you build a social strategy? It all starts with analytics. Measuring your social media presence and analyzing your metrics allows you to determine exactly what’s working and what’s not, and lets you focus your efforts on strategies that have proven results.

Here are some key Facebook social media metrics you should be tracking:

Click-Through-Rate (CTR): CTR is an important metric to measure because it lets you know how successful your content is at engaging your audience. And when paired with Facebook Pixel tracking for ads, you can track your CTR as it relates directly to conversions. You can also dive a little deeper into your social media CTR by looking at website bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your website after only viewing one page. Tracking the bounce rate of visitors from social networks allows you to compare that rate to website users who visit your site either directly or from another source. If your social media website bounce rate is lower than other sources, you can report that social media is driving the most valuable traffic to your website.

Follower or Likes Growth: Is your audience base consistently growing? Understanding your audience growth rate is important to know when determining whether or not your social media strategy is working. If you are truly bringing value to your audience with rich, meaningful content, then it is only natural that your audience will continue to grow. If this is not the case, it may be time to take a closer look at your strategy.

In the Insights section of your Facebook page, you can track your page likes growth. Facebook will show you your likes, unlikes, organic or paid likes and net likes in a simple graph format. Here, you can visually see if you are gaining or loosing likes consistently.

Conversation (Engagement) Rate: What’s the point of posting if no one is engaging with you? In order to gain insight about who and how many viewers are interacting with your content, try tracking your conversation rate (a metric created by Avinash Kaushik). Your conversation rate is the ratio of comments per post (or per month) to your overall number of followers. This metric tells you exactly what percentage of your followers feel compelled to add their voice to your brand or to interact with your company socially.

If you’re looking at your engagement rate per post, you can then use this metric to predict how much engagement you will receive (on average) with different post types, audience members or time of day.

Reach/Impressions: Reach is the potential number of audience members you are able to communicate with. Impressions are the actual number of times a user saw your messaging — keep in mind that impressions will most likely be larger than reach because users can see the same message multiple times. These metrics are important to understand as they relate to engagement rate. If you are receiving high reach and impressions but have below average engagement rate (average: 1.92 percent), you may want to reevaluate your messaging and determine how you could better be engaging your audience.

Conversions and Leads: Because these metrics are directly correlated to revenue, conversions and leads are probably two of the most important social media metrics you can track. Facebook makes it easy to track conversions with their Facebook Pixel Tracking which allows you to optimize and manage cross-device conversions, as well as set up custom conversions that let you track basically any action on your website — button clicks, page visits, content views, you name it.

Measuring leads is also a great way to show social value. Generating measurable social media leads can be achieved through social media only promotional codes, gated content, contest or campaigns and hosting social media events. Just make sure that any links or information you share is trackable within your analytics software, like Google Analytics.

Top Content: This metric speaks for itself. In order to best optimize your social strategy you need to know what content performs best with your audience. Because managing all social platforms is a full-time job, you should only focus your efforts on producing content that generates measurable results.