How to Use Facebook Analytics to Improve Audience Targeting

Liquidlabs
Sep 5, 2018 · 8 min read
The more data points you have, the clearer the bigger picture.

As any advertiser knows, social media enables you to connect instantly with your audience and is an essential marketing tool. But, if you’re only using a fraction of a tool’s power, what are you missing out on? For a business owner, it might be that big sale. For a marketer, it’s a complete picture of user interactions over time.

As ever, social media tools are constantly evolving. Ensuring your posts and ads have the great copy, images and CTAs is no longer enough. If you’re not targeting your audience properly, it will affect your results by wasting valuable ad spend which ultimately affects revenue from your marketing.

That’s why Facebook Analytics is a fantastic tool that can help improve your ad targeting and campaigns. And best of all, it’s free!

Facebook Analytics is a powerful platform that rivals Google Analytics and lets advertisers learn more about the entire journey that a user takes across the Facebook ecosystem (messenger, Instagram, and more).

In this article, we’ll share ways Facebook Analytics can help you refine campaigns, use it to understand your audiences better, and track the results from organic and paid marketing across multiple devices and sessions in what Facebook calls “people-first analytics for an omnichannel world.” (omnichannel is one of those marketing buzzwords words that simply means “in more than one place”).

What Data is Available in Facebook Analytics?

Facebook Analytics is designed to work in tandem with Facebook Ads.

Previously, Facebook allowed you to see only the last touch point in your funnels. So let’s say, for example, that someone interacted with a video, then three more your posts, purchasing on the last interaction. Only the final interaction would be given credit for the conversion.

Without being able to track all outcomes we had to resort to guesswork, resulting in a lot of wasted ad spend.

Now you can see the full interaction path to the conversion, rather than just the last touch point. So, advertisers can now see user interactions with advanced goal paths and sales funnels for Facebook ads.

Summing up, this multi-attribution model enables us to make decisions based off of this more granular data!

Winona levels of happy right now.

The Facebook Analytics update added these features:

  • Omnichannel analytics, for example you can see users who interacted with the Facebook app, then moved to your website, and then to Facebook desktop before they became a lead or conversion.
  • Bespoke dashboards so you can see key data at a glance.
  • The capability to build out custom audiences based on omnichannel insights.
  • The ability to create event source groups from the dashboard, allowing you to segment and retarget people who followed a specific event path on your page.
  • Advanced machine learning/AI capabilities to display important insights, such as which audiences are most often engaging with or converting from your content.

That’s a lot of robust targeting potential, so let’s look at how we can utilise Facebook Analytics.

Setting Up Facebook Analytics

To get started, login to your Facebook Business Manager account and navigate to the “Measure & report” menu item and select “Analytics”.

Important: for this dashboard to work, you need to install a Facebook pixel. Once you’ve installed it and allowed it time to operate, your dashboard will populate with all of your analytics data. You can read our blog 5 Facebook Remarketing Keys to Success to learn how to set up a pixel.

Once you open Facebook Analytics, you are presented with a list of “analytics entities”. This is your list of accessible pages and pixels.

We recommend setting up what Facebook calls an “Event Source Group”. The reason for this is that it allows you to follow users across multiple channels, providing a better snapshot of the customer journey.

Simply click on the “Create event source group” button in the top right corner of the page and then select the pages and pixels that’d you’d like to overview. Select your newly created ESG, and you’ll notice straight away that it automatically generates key data, from growth, engagement and money to people and user actions taken into an Overview section.

Excellent, indeed.

If you can’t see an asset, for example a pixel or page, it’s likely because you don’t have the necessary owner privileges. If you are an agency managing accounts on your client’s behalf, you will need the account owner of the relevant pages and pixels to share access (e.g. admin) with you before you can set up Facebook Analytics to analyse their data for them.

Finally, it may take a while for your data to populate. So set it up, grab a coffee, and then return to crunch that data.

A damn fine cup of coffee

Exploring Facebook Analytics

There are so many things you can do with this tool, not unlike Google Analytics, but let’s take a look over some of the powerful features that can help you increase customer understanding, and hopefully sales!

Funnel Reporting

As per any funnel reporting tool, using funnels in Facebook Analytics lets us measure conversions from a sequence of actions.

To begin, click on the “Funnels” in the menu on the left of the dashboard and you will be invited to create a funnel. Add funnel steps to create a logical sequence of events to track during the customer journey.

In this example funnel, you can see that we have created a simple three step funnel for User Activity, Page Views and then Completed Registrations.

As you can see in the example, 21% viewed the web page after having interacted with the initial Facebook ad. Then 48% of these users went on to complete the registration.

From this data alone, we can see immediately that our landing pages are converting at a healthy rate. This is likely due to the fact that they’ve been subjected to good Conversion Rate Optimisation (split testing against different audiences with images, copy, headings, etc).

Underneath the funnel, you’ll find more valuable metrics. These include the number of events, people and completion time for each step. This is great data because at a glance you can see where to optimise the user experience. An example might be a bottleneck in the funnel where you can see a high drop off of users, so you know this needs to be fixed, for example a form with too many fields.

Remember that you can also re-order your funnel steps easily by dragging and dropping them, refine the parameters of a funnel for more precise data, and even breakdown the funnel using additional parameters or by time.

Revenue Reporting

Another great feature of Facebook Analytics is the Revenue reporting. Simply select “Revenue” from the menu on the left and then select a date range.

You can then view key metrics for revenue over the selected date range, from total ad spend and cost per conversion to Return on Actual Spend (ROAS).

Revenue reporting at a glance is a dream come true!

This is great to see which customers are your most valuable ones, providing the best cost per acquisition.

Journey Reporting

Not this Journey, but still just as excellent.

Another fantastic feature is the ability to track a user’s journey from first interaction to completing the goal metric, for example a registration download or purchase.

To do this, select “Journey” from the left menu and begin mapping out a journey based on a goal. Remember to select the relevant date range. Facebook Analytics will then start processing the journey data for the relevant Facebook event. This can take up to a few hours to complete.

Once all the data is processed, you can see metrics such as total journeys and the percentage of converted journeys. You can also see what channel a user started on and where they finished, including whether they converted or not. These metrics provide you with an idea of the total number of touchpoints along the way, and what value each touchpoint can be attributed for each conversion.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Reporting

We’ve talked about the importance of CLV before as a key KPI for marketing success. Facebook obviously believes this to be the case too.

To see your CLV, select “Lifetime Value” from the left menu. After this you can choose options like All Users or perhaps just Paying Users.

Here’s an example of a Paying Users CLV chart.

CLV enables us to predict the value of a customer over a designated period of time, for example a business quarter or years at a time.

Your CLV will take into account things like customer churn, cost to acquire the costumer and many more things. It’s an incredibly powerful insight that enables you to immediately glimpse which users are the most lucrative among your audience.

Start Leveraging Your Facebook Analytics Data!

Now it’s your turn to start leveraging the Facebook Analytics data for your business or stakeholders.

As this tool is still quite new and in initial stages of development, it’s a great chance to become an early adopter (and an advantage over competitors!).

So, take the opportunity to become accustomed with it start testing it out!

If you want to explode your leads and sales, why not schedule a Free Strategy Session with us today?


Written by Miles Openshaw (Liquidlabs, Content Manager)

Liquidlabs empower organisations with digital marketing strategies. Check us out!

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Liquidlabs

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We empower organisations with digital marketing strategies. Free consultation sessions now available — https://liquidlabs.com.au/

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