Facebook Analytics As A Source For Web analytics In Addition To Google Analytics
Utilizing Facebook Analytics to get an additional source of web analytics is essential to get a more in-depth understanding of how your online business develops through data.
While you might get away with using just Google Analytics for your data needs, the fact is that you can also use Facebook Analytics to get a different view on crucial metrics.
The different views can unveil opportunities you might not see available on Google Analytics.
Facebook Analytics can give you a lot of crucial data to run your online business by default, while in Google Analytics, you might need to set it up to your specific needs.
That said, it will require set upping as well.
But as a free social media marketing tool, Facebook Analytics is irreplaceable for anyone looking to grow on social media, whether via Facebook Ads or organically.
Utilizing the many default reports that quickly displays growth metrics for your digital marketing strategy makes you find more opportunities to find actionable growth from your website.
Learn more about digital marketing analytics.
Facebook Analytics vs. Facebook Page Insights
This article is about Facebook Analytics and not Facebook Page Insights, so keep that in mind while you read.
Meta has since discontinued Facebook Analytics and replaced it with Facebook Insights; learn more here.
An important distinction we need to make is that while you can use Facebook Analytics to discover data from your Facebook Page, if you want to understand Facebook posts’ reach, the data for that you can only see through Facebook Page Insights.
If you want to grow with a Facebook page, the insights reports within your Facebook Page will be more crucial in understanding the said page’s performance.
Through Facebook Analytics, you can also see the performance of any apps you might have on the platform.
But first, we need to understand what Facebook Analytics is and how to get it running correctly.
What Is Facebook Analytics
Facebook Analytics is a free web analytics tool provided by Facebook that lets website managers get more insightful data on their users that businesses can use to grow through understanding their core audiences better.
Facebook Analytics uses Facebook Pixel to get valuable user data from your website and displays the data through dashboards and key metrics.
By default, the dashboards provide core user behavior data based on activity, revenue data, and more, which we will cover in this article.
Facebook Analytics offers similar data on your website performance as Google Analytics, but the numbers may differ as both platforms differ in measuring core metrics.
That said, utilizing both for analyzing the true performance of a website is crucial to benchmark future marketing efforts for having a greater understanding to create a more reliable performance marketing strategy.
In essence, companies using web analytics platforms can get more data to improve their online businesses for free.
But as Facebook matches the available users from Facebook data to the website users, you can learn more about your target audiences. If you are solely using Google Analytics, it can’t use social media data to enhance user profiles.
How To Get Facebook Analytics
First, you will need to get a Facebook ad account or Facebook Business Manager account to get your pixel id and code.
After you’ve created the accounts, head over to the Event Manager, create your Pixel, and install it on your website.
If you need more information on installing the Pixel or just curious about the features the Pixel itself can do, read our in-depth guide on the Facebook pixel here.
After you have installed the Pixel on your website, you can access Facebook Analytics properly.
Once you’re in your ad account or business manager account, you can access Facebook Analytics through the tab found on the right.
It will show you a shortcut to everything you can do with Facebook Business Manager. Then you want to scroll down until you find the section called “Analyze and Report,” where you can finally see the link for Facebook Analytics.
Make sure you’ve opened the right Pixel to see the correct data you want. It will be under “Pixels” with the name you gave it.
From here, you can also access Facebook Page Analytics, but not Page insights.
You will know you’re in the right place if you see the “highlights” that show by default, the following:
- New Users
- Unique Users
- Week 1 Retention
- Median Session Length
After we have correctly set up Facebook analytics, let’s see everything it can do for a business.
All The Facebook Analytics Features and Everything You Can Do With It
Facebook Analytics divides data into two main groups: Activity and People.
In a nutshell, activity metrics measure your website’s user behavior, and people metrics measure demographics.
While the default dashboard can already give a lot of data and metrics you to analyze, and provide the first impression on everything the tool can do for you.
Creating a unique dashboards lets you control what you will see every time you use the tool. For example, having the core metrics crucial for you upfront can save you time in the long-term and help you make data-driven decisions faster.
But for now, let’s go through the reports more in detail to get a better understanding of what Facebook Analytics tracks from the users of your website.
Activity Metrics On Facebook Analytics
With using the activity metrics to track the performance of your website you can see
- How your users use your website
- Revenue created
- Sales funnels and user progressions through them
- Retention
- And conversions through events
- Much more.
Now let’s look at the different default activity metrics in more detail and what you can do with the data.
Active Users
The active user’s Facebook Analytics report first greets you with how many unique and new users you have had in 28 days compared to the last 28 period. Or any other time frame you have chosen for the default.
Then you will see the median session length, which helps you understand how long your website users stay on the website.
Through sessions, you will see how many sessions your users generate.
You can display data from your users, events, and avg. Events per user.
Then you can show the data by choosing one of the following distinctions:
- Overall
- Age
- Browser & Browser Version
- Channel
- City
- Client Type
- Country, or Region
- Current Domain
- Current URL
- Device Model, OS, Version, type, screen sizes
- Gender, or language
- Mobile carrier
- Referrer domain and URLs
- Traffic sources, search engines, and social networks
- UTM campaign
- Content
- Medium
- Name
- Source
- Term
- Sessions properties
- Same as all the above but for sessions specifically.
As you can see, the activity report can give you very detailed data about user activity, which is beneficial for understanding how your target audiences behave and how they will use your website.
Revenue
The revenue report makes Facebook Analytics an alternative source to track your sales data, especially useful for online stores looking to grow their sales and understand crucial averages per user.
You will learn the following:
- Total Revenue
- Total Purchases
- Unique Purchasers
- Revenue per paying user
- Avg. Revenue per Purchase
- Avg. Purchase per user
Then you can modify the data with the show by function to see revenue per any of the possible views.
If you have enough data available, you can also see revenue per age and gender groups.
Funnels
In the funnels report – you can analyze the performance of your funnels.
For example, the first thing you notice about your funnels is the funnel conversion rate and the median completion time.
By default, the installed Pixel may create automatically funnels from your prior events.
But you should create your funnels that align with your goals.
Here you can see a visual representation of the success of your funnel. For example, you will quickly understand what percentage users drop in various funnel steps you have.
Remember to modify your funnels representing the reality of any given funnel on your website, any wrong steps in a funnel can lead to misleading and unusable data.
Cohorts
In the cohorts report, you can create custom cohorts based on user actions of your websites.
You can use it to understand your retention rate, repeat purchase rate, and your customers’ lifetime values, for instance.
By default Facebook Analytics provides some essential cohorts, you can start to analyze from your users, and you can find them in the activity section in Facebook Analytics.
The default cohorts are user retention and lifetime value.
Retention
The retention report shows you how users retained in your product and website over a given time frame.
Understanding retention, you’ll know how many users come back to your website and products.
For example, you can discover which user demographics are the most retained, data which could be very useful when planning out the next steps.
Lifetime Value
The Lifetime Value – report measures revenue generated overtime by users after their first interaction with your website or app.
In Facebook Analytics, you can see the lifetime value by the day, weekly, and monthly intervals.
By analyzing the lifetime value report, you can discover how the overall lifetime value develops over time compared to past dates.
Remember that lifetime value uses the same revenue data it collects, which means its usefulness to measuring your real lifetime value of customer depends largely if your business is solely online and trackable through the Pixel.
Breakdowns
In breakdowns, Facebook Analytics allows you to create specific pivot tables of existing data.
You can choose up to three individual parameters like a channel, age, or a traffic source.
First, you need to choose an event from which you want to see a data breakdown. And then select the relevant parameters you desire.
Using breakdowns, you can more easily understand the relationship between users and events.
And you can discover more in-depth correlations to improve your online business.
There are no presets for breakdowns, so you will need to create your own.
Percentiles
The report breaks down what percentage of users does an event or action on the website through percentiles.
For example, you can see how much the top 1% of users spend on your website.
Or how many pages your top users will interact with on average.
Understanding percentiles and creating audiences based on them for advertising can be useful.
For example, if you know how much the top 1% of users spent, you can divert your marketing efforts towards that group.
Events
The events report is a collection of all your events in one place.
It’ll quickly show you:
- Count of events
- Month over month growth in the event count
- Today’s count
- Unique users that triggered events
- Event value
The event report is helpful because you will have an overview of all your events’ performance at a glance.
Events Debugging
You can use events debugging to see all events logged on your website and see if they are logging correctly.
Using events debugging from time to time, you will discover any potential errors that might impact your performance tracking.
Overlap
In the overlap report, you can analyze the overlapping users from different channels.
For example, you see the overlap rate between users who use a mobile device, computer, or tablet.
You can filter the data to see the overlap rate for other events, such as purchases or any other custom FB event you may have.
For example, you can discover if there is an overlap between desktop and mobile for add to carts. Meaning a user has added to a cart from both channels.
An excellent report for understanding if users use multiple channels to access your website.
People Metrics On Facebook Analytics
With people metrics, you will understand who are the users of your website and learn more about your target audience through demographic data and the devices they use to access your website.
Demographic Data
In the demographics data report, you will discover the primary metrics of your users.
Such as:
- Age
- Countries
- Cities
- Languages
Technology
The technology report list the devices and operating systems that your users use.
Being on top of what your users use to access your website is crucial for optimizing your website.
You always want to make sure you have your website optimized for your target audiences that produce the most value to your website.
Conclusion
In the end, is Facebook Analytics worth it?
Yes, very much so.
As a free web analytics tool, and the way Facebook collects additional user data, can help you discover more data points from where you can improve every aspect of your business.
Whether you’re:
- Optimizing online advertising results
- Discovering the best marketing channels
- Optimizing sales funnels
- Looking for data-driven opportunities
But whether you should only use Facebook Analytics for your online business’s web analytics needs, it wouldn’t probably be the best idea.
But if we consider the overall benefits of having the Pixel installed on your website, having additional analytics reports on Facebook can be very useful for growth.
So you have the Pixel installed or planning to, you should check Facebook Analytics and the many reports it may have to uncover more about your website and how users behave on it.