Facebook Insights (also Meta Insights) is the latest Facebook analytics tool that allows you to track, optimize and enhance your Facebook marketing efforts via analyzing metrics of your Facebook Page and business Instagram accounts.
As Meta decided to discontinue Facebook Analytics as a tool, Facebook Insights is the primary tool that Meta provides for you to track Facebook Page and Instagram Metrics.
Compared to the old tool, Facebook Insights offers fewer metrics that used to be helpful for a more precise analysis of your organic Facebook performance. However, the tool offers new metrics and combines the most crucial metrics into one place, making it easier to keep tabs on your Facebook performance, whether paid or organic.
While Facebook Insights is the primary method to discover your Facebook Page performance data, you can still use Facebook ads manager and Ads reporting tools to manage, track and optimize your Facebook ads and Instagram ads performance.
For every Facebook advertiser, it is critical to know how their ad performance compares to the organic performance to create even better future social media marketing campaigns.
You will find metrics about content performance, audience insights, a benchmarking tool, and a goal-setting tool within Facebook Insights.
In this article, we will explore how to use Facebook Insights, analyze the metrics it provides, learn how to use goals, and finally, how to optimize Facebook Page and Instagram content with Facebook Insights.
How To Use Facebook Insights?
Starting using Facebook Insights is simple, as it only requires you to go to business.facebook.com, access Meta Business Suite and select your business account and corresponding Facebook Page.
Note that every Facebook Page (and an Instagram profile that you connect to) has their Suite, including Facebook Insights. And it’s created for every page automatically.
You must connect an Instagram profile to your Facebook page to see Instagram-related insights.
Click the Insights -button on the left sidebar or the “see all insights” on the right to access all data.
If it’s your first time this week, you will get a popup of “Your last week in review,” a weekly performance review of your Instagram and Facebook Page activity. It shows you the following with a glance:
- Your Facebook and Instagram activity (how many posts you published)
- Your goals (How you are achieving your Goals)
- Your results (Tells your Facebook and Instagram reach last week)
You’ll see all data related to your pages and profiles from the overview.
You can choose any of the six tabs from the left sidebar to start exploring and analyzing data in more detail.
Paid vs. Organic Reach and Impressions
Before we look at the metrics individually, it’s vital to understand that Facebook Insights often includes Paid and Organic reach and impressions to the total figures you might see.
It’s great when you need to understand the total performance of your Facebook Page or Instagram profile.
In the Ad Trends section, you can only see the Paid reach and impressions, which you can deduct from the total amounts, or more conveniently, open the Content Overview to learn more about your organic performance.
But now, let’s learn about the metrics that help you optimize further growth!
Facebook Insights Metrics Explained
Facebook Insights includes many metrics that help you run and grow a Facebook Page and an Instagram account. You will find metrics about your audience, content performance, competitors, and results.
You can discover all metrics in their respective section inside Facebook Insights.
Every metric gives you an exact number of how much of something you have, have gained or lost, changes in demography, and more.
When used correctly and combined with your social media marketing strategy, these metrics allow you to start growing your organic results from Facebook and Instagram.
Now let’s look at each of the metrics individually:
- What is the metric?
- What does it tell you?
- How can you use it?
Facebook Insights Results Metrics
Result-based metrics tell you what you have achieved in the given time frame, which you can modify to your liking. These figures include data from advertising as well.
Analyzing the charts, you can discover how well you’re doing from a day-to-day perspective. For example, how well you did a week ago compared to the latest week.
Learn any up or downward trends that impact your performance and results
And internally, think about every action you might’ve done during the same time frame. For example:
- Did you create more posts or more ad creatives?
- Did a particular post go viral?
- Did you spend more?
- Think of anything else that would have impacted the performance.
To see per post-performance, you will need to analyze from the content section in Facebook Insights, which we’ll cover soon.
Facebook Page & Instagram Reach & Impressions
The Facebook Page and Instagram Reach tell you how many people and unique Instagram accounts saw any available content (Posts, stories, ads, social information) from your Facebook Page or Instagram Profile.
While the reach is a good tool for analyzing how much awareness your content creates, it’s still only an estimate at the end of the day. Something to keep in your mind!
The Facebook Page and Instagram impressions differ from reach by one crucial detail: Impressions include all views of the content. For example, one unique profile or person can see the post multiple times.
That is why impressions are usually a lot higher than your effective reach.
Understanding your reach and impression growth helps you dictate what type of content works best for your page and profile.
The more reach and impressions you get, the more engagement, followers, and likes you’ll get.
Getting more people to engage with your content is hard when reach gets low.
Facebook Page and Instagram Profile Visits
Facebook Page and Instagram profile visits count the times anyone visited your Page or Profile in the given time frame.
For others, measuring profile visit growth can impact their business more significantly than others.
For some, it’s more important to have engaging content than a visit to a page or profile.
Your Facebook Page or Instagram Profile usually includes conversions (link to an online store or lead form, downloadable content, etc.). Understanding how many people engage with your page directly will be more critical to your future performance.
As visits don’t tell more than it says, you will need to discover the click-through rate to analyze your funnels further.
New Facebook Page Likes and New Instagram Followers
The metrics tell you exactly how many new likes and followers you gained during the chosen time frame.
While the metrics may seem simple, they tell you much more than meets the eye.
Because the number of followers and likes you generate tells you exactly how your current social media strategy within Facebook and Instagram performs.
Even if you’re not actively trying to grow likes and followers, its effects go deeper into your whole performance when it comes to Facebook and Instagram.
Look at it like this, the more followers and page likes you gain, the more potential reach your business and brand will receive. Also, the more followers and likes you have, the more engagement opportunities you have with your audience, generating more opportunities for content to reach people outside your core audience.
Growing Facebook Page likes, and Instagram followers should be a growth goal of any strategy using these platforms as they offer more long-term benefits than it may first seem.
As the metrics tell you the number of new instead of all likes and followers, you can quite quickly analyze what strategies worked for you.
If you want to use ads to grow either Facebook Page Likes or Instagram Followers, check out the articles from the provided links.
Ad Trends
In short, ad trends tell you two metrics that show the trends of your paid reach and impressions in the chosen time frame.
These metrics won’t help you much if you are an active Facebook advertiser. You will want to use the Facebook ads manager to deal, analyze, and optimize everything to do with Facebook ads.
But always look at the metrics, as they will show you the comparison between paid vs. organic reach and impressions. And this can be helpful, so you stay on top of how well you do organic performance vs. paid performance.
Facebook Insights Audience Metrics
In the audience metrics- section, you will find the breakdown of your current total audience of your Facebook Page or Instagram profile.
The best use case of the audience -section is to monitor the exact number of page likes and followers you might have currently.
As it showcases your audience size and demographic makeup, it will help you create custom and lookalike audiences for Facebook advertising down the line.
But you can quickly try to learn more about the audience via the demographic details. Knowing the perfect customers and who is likely to engage with your products now is critical for any business.
And for example, if you have a more detailed understanding of your current audience from, say, sales data, you compare it to the audience data of your social profiles. You can start driving your audience towards what you need if there’s a mismatch.
It’s also an excellent time to evaluate whether and how your Facebook audience differs from your Instagram audience and try to learn from that data.
Note that you won’t see audience data insights when you have fewer than 100 Facebook Page Likes or Instagram Followers.
Now let’s look at the metrics more closely.
Facebook Page and Instagram Followers
The metrics show the exact number of how many Facebook Page likes and Instagram followers you have now.
From a workflow perspective, it’s faster to use Facebook Insights to quickly learn your audience sizes than individually looking at your page or profile.
Age & Gender
The first thing to know about the age and gender demographic data is that it’s an estimate based on what users provide to Facebook and Instagram.
So it will never be an exact number, but a good indicator of your audience’s age and gender.
Insights show the gender split between women and men, and by hovering over the pie chart, you can see the exact split in percentages or looking at the percentages below the age breakdown.
Insights break down the age of your audience into six different categories:
- 18-24
- 25-34
- 35-44
- 45-54
- 55-64
- 65+
And every age category has a gender breakdown as well.
When growing a Facebook page or an Instagram profile, it’s vital to understand who your audience is to make better ads and content that reflects them as it increases engagement between you and your audience.
Top Cities & Countries
The metric shows you where your audience is by offering the top cities and countries.
You will get a top ten list of the countries and cities for a Facebook Page audience, but for an Instagram audience, you only get a top five list of the countries and cities.
Insights list the countries and cities from top to bottom while showing the corresponding percentage of the audience located there.
While the metric can help grow their Facebook Page and Instagram profiles, for some, it may not provide enough data to make sound data-driven decisions for growth.
For example, a Facebook page with most of the audience from two to three countries or cities can make a good call on how to continue growing.
But if your Facebook page or Instagram audience is worldwide with a more even split by cities or countries, it can be hard to determine who or where you should concentrate on designing new content, for example.
Nevertheless, understanding even the top cities and countries can help you know more about your audience and further help you grow these social profiles.
Potential Audience
The potential audience -section helps you create audiences for advertising based on what could work for your current audience.
In our experience, it has never been too accurate for the purpose, and we recommend using the audience tools to create more specific audiences for Facebook advertising. But it’s an option.
It shows the demographic data for the potential audience, the same we have already looked at earlier such as:
- Potential audience size
- Age & Gender
- Top Cities and Countries
- Top pages
Facebook Insights Content Performance Overview Metrics
The content metrics in Facebook Insights break down all the data you need to know from your organic performance on your Facebook Page or Instagram profile.
It breaks down all the metrics into three categories:
- Organic Reach
- Organic Engagement
- Top-performing organic posts
In the content overview -section, you will see all the data related to a chosen content style. You can analyze the performance of Facebook Posts, Facebook Stories, Instagram Posts, or Instagram Stories.
At a glance, you can explore a variety of metrics related to the three categories we mentioned.
It gives you an easy way to learn what content or media type performed the best in the last 90 days. You can measure the performance in either reach or engagement metrics and also see the top post for each of the metrics.
The overview is for quickly analyzing instead of deep-diving into individual posts and stories’ performance. For that, you will need to go to the content- section below the overview.
But now for more metrics!
Organic Reach Metrics
Essentially, all organic reach metrics show how much you’ve gained reach in the last 90 days compared to the previous 90 days.
You will see a total reach gained. And you’ll also see the median post reach per media type (Videos, images, carousel, links, audio, or text) or per content format (album posts, other posts, live posts, reels, stories,360 video, and image posts).
For Instagram, you will also get a breakdown of organic reach between Posts, IGTV, Reels, and carousel posts.
For optimizing your Facebook or Instagram reach, learn everything you can by analyzing what media type and content format worked best for you. Replicating winning posts can achieve sustainable growth.
But never stop experimenting every once in a while because you can’t achieve beyond average performance by doing the same thing all the time.
Organic Engagement Metrics
Like the reach metrics, organic engagement metrics show you much you’ve gained different engagements in the last 90 days compared to the previous 90 days.
And you will see the total amount of engagements (Post reactions and likes, comments, shares, story replies) you have received.
You will see the median post and stories reactions, comments, replies, and shares Per media type that includes images, links, videos, audio, and text.
You will also see a breakdown of median post reactions, comments, and shares per content format, including other posts, live posts, reels, album posts, 360 videos, and images.
Engagement metrics tell you what content your audience engages with the most.
When growing a Facebook page or Instagram profile, focusing on your audience’s engagement can significantly increase your chances of further growth as engagement leads to users sharing content outside your initial audience.
And what’s the point of having a bunch of followers and likes if they don’t engage with your content every time you post something. You can achieve more of your business goals when you achieve an audience that engages with you.
When in doubt, increase engagement by analyzing the best engaging content, re-create its style, and start growing the audience organically.
Top-Performing organic posts and stories
Here you can see the following top posts in either Facebook posts and stories or Instagram posts and stories in the last 90 days:
- Highest reach on a post or story
- Highest reactions or likes on a post
- Highest comments on a post
- Highest sticker taps on a story
- The highest volume of replies to a story
The top posts will let you know how much they gained from the particular engagement or reach compared to your median posts.
When out of content ideas, always look at your top posts for creating something new that has a high chance of replicating that success.
But now, let’s look at the performance of individual posts, so you can get an even better picture of what works for your Facebook page or Instagram profile.
Facebook Insights Content Performance Breakdown
If you want to analyze per post or story performance, you need to head over to the content breakdown, which you can find under Content in Facebook Insights and click Content.
This report allows you to see most of the metrics we have already shown you earlier and more on a per-post basis within the given time frame that you can modify for a better analysis.
The report lists all the published posts or stories on your Facebook Page or Instagram and helps you determine truly what posts and stories work best for growing in your unique case.
Compare results between every post to discover desirable trends in the metrics Facebook Insights provides you.
In the content breakdown, you will see these metrics for analyzing performance:
- Post Type
- Reach
- Likes and Reactions
- Sticker Taps
- Replies
- Link Clicks
- Comments
- Shares
- Results and Cost Per Result (Only for ads)
Depending on what you want to achieve with your Facebook Page or Instagram profile, you can sort by the metrics you are after and discover the best posts.
For example, when you want the most reach, sort by reach and see the top posts that gained the most reach, and try to replicate their success to your best abilities.
Or if you want to see what posts generated the most link clicks (for example, landing pages, online stores, etc.). Then sort by link clicks, see the formula and improve your posts for even better performance.
Ultimately, the ability to see your organic or paid post performance in such a manner helps every Facebook or Instagram marketer to make better decisions on how to grow their likes, following, and reach. Without the tool, it would be harder to identify what works at scale.
Remember that you can also export the content performance to a file and use other tools for more detailed analysis.
How To Use Facebook Insights Benchmarking Tool
One of the more underrated tools within Facebook Insights is the benchmarking tool that allows you to benchmark your performance against competing Facebook Pages and Instagram Profiles.
To start using the benchmarking tool, head to Insights and click Benchmarking.
First, you will see an assortment of Facebook pages and Instagram profiles that may be related to you. In most cases, it’s not going to be accurate, and you will need to add “businesses” or pages and Instagram profiles that you know are competitors.
You can add up to 100 pages. Try to have at least ten pages and Instagram profiles you want to follow.
Not every Facebook Page or Instagram profile will be available here because businesses can opt out of the benchmarking tool.
If you don’t want other pages seeing your performance, you can also opt-out from the tool but won’t have access to how other similar pages perform compared to yours.
The benchmarking tool helps you determine whether you or your competitor is gaining more. Or even discover that the uplift you gained is an industry trend instead.
Next, we will look at the benchmarking metrics available on a Facebook Page or an Instagram Profile.
Benchmarking Metrics
In the benchmarking -section within Facebook Insights, you will discover benchmarking metrics that help you compare your results within similar businesses, Facebook Pages, and Instagram profiles.
The metrics it shows you are the following about competing Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts:
- Page likes & followers (how many likes or followers the compared Page has)
- Page Likes or follower change (The growth or decline compared to yours)
- How much content they’ve published on either platform
These metrics should help you understand your performance against your closest competitors on Facebook or Instagram.
How to Use Facebook Insights Goals
Facebook Insights goals tool lets you set follower or reach-based goals for your Facebook Page and Instagram profile and helps you keep track of your next target.
Goals are vital in any digital marketing strategy, and for growing Facebook page likes or Instagram followers, achievable goals help you achieve what you want easier.
Start using Goals in Facebook Insights by going to the Facebook Insights overview and clicking the new goal or getting started.
Here you can choose between two goals (reach or followers), and you can create goals for both your Instagram and Facebook Page.
A goal lasts for 28 days.
You can choose between four difficulty levels:
- Starter
- Intermediate
- Advanced
- Custom
While you can set a custom goal for whatever you want, remember being realistic is always better. Growth is a journey, and you want to create small steps you can overcome. Don’t make them too easy or too hard. Find a balance that helps you grow. There isn’t a right or wrong answer here. You choose the pace of growth.
Lastly, select a starting date and confirm.
You can follow your progress in the overview, and in the results- section, you will have a more detailed view of performance against your goals.
Conclusion
Now you should understand the Facebook Insights in Meta Business Suite tool. You should also have the means to use it and eventually discover the best way to optimize your Facebook Page and Instagram.
As a free and automatically set up tool, it’s a tool that every Instagram and Facebook marketer should use, even when more robust tools would be available.
You can always rely on and return to using it when other tools are unavailable.
In the end, Facebook Insights offers a great starting place for growing a Facebook Page or an Instagram Profile with more followers, likes, engagement, and reach.