Did you hear the news?
Facebook Analytics is going away forever starting June 30, 2021. And not everyone is happy about it. Adding it to the never-ending list of Facebook changes, changing analytics on any platform can make even the most seasoned digital marketer shudder.
First, let’s rewind a bit. Chances are you have used, or maybe even managed, a Facebook Business account for a business or organization. Facebook as a whole, is a great social media platform to build communities, reach a larger audience, and has a suite of stellar paid advertising solutions to target your audience when compared to many of its competitors. Connect more people with the help of YoutubeStorm.
But with any behemoth, its tentacles grips many touchpoints in your buyer’s journey and your marketing machine overall. When Facebook made the announcement last month, it took over the news cycle for longer than a minute. With time to marinate and research, I’m here to help you understand what this change means to you as a marketer using Facebook for your company’s marketing efforts and how-to prepare over the next few months.
FACEBOOK ANALYTICS IS A POWERFUL TOOL
Facebook Analytics, truthfully, is one of the more enhanced built-in social media metrics tools compared to its competitors, like LinkedIn and Twitter. For years, I have been looking to the built-in tool to gain insights on my posts, reach, and even audiences to improve my social strategy myself. Facebook Analytics is often confused with Facebook Insights (not going away). Facebook Analytics you need to enter via the Business Suite of tools. Over the years however, Facebook has shifted away from evolving Facebook Analytics and pivoting more towards their Business Suite of products for advertising capabilities and event pixel initiatives.
Facebook Analytics in all its glory is a free and easy-to-use tool. Additionally, being one of the first social media platforms widely adopted by most, the metrics are people based analytics providing powerful insights that most other platforms envy.
There were reports based around Activity & People, which provided insights on follower demographics, along with post activity, funnel, and journeys. The only con of Facebook Analytics is the lack of a Support Center or Help Desk to help marketers better understand the tool. For example, a lot of the reporting features of Facebook Analytics require additional set-up, so it wasn’t ideal for the everyday user or SMB owner since the out-of-the-box reports were lacking in many ways.
Facebook Analytics is going away, and with that we must say goodbye and plan ahead.
FACEBOOK ANALYTICS IS GOING AWAY: WHAT THIS MEANS
Here’s the tea: There really wasn’t a straight reason why Facebook decided to put Facebook Analytics on the chopping block. In fact, the official word from Facebook to make the announcement was pretty short and absent of details.
Many in the digital marketing industry feel that the reason to eliminate Facebook Analytics off the platform was to push their other tools such as Facebook Business Suite, Ads Manager, and Events Manager. These tools are helpful in terms of advertising efforts, event pixels for retargeting, and for helping marketers and business owners understand audiences through ultra-personal data. That is on top of the built-in Facebook Insights that provides social media metrics currently as well as an “overview” view of your account and its associated accounts.
Let’s dive in and start going over some of the new tools that are going to become your new favorite to add to your marketing toolkit.
WORKAROUNDS MARKETERS CAN TAKE
Don’t we all love a good workaround to get what we need?
Marketers should be scrappy, and the ones managing the digital and social channels know best how certain social platforms just can be very finicky with Business Accounts. For example, have you ever been in a situation where your personal social account is linked to a business account? I know I have, and we’ve talked about it in our virtual happy hours and coffee breaks at least a few times.
There are a few different options we have in terms of new tools we can both learn, and leverage for anything Facebook marketing and replace the Facebook Analytics function starting July 1:
- Social Media Scheduler & Built-Ins
- Facebook Business Suite
- Ads Manager
- Events Manager
USE A SOCIAL MEDIA SCHEDULER WITH ANALYTICS FUNCTIONALITY
Hopefully, most marketers and social media managers are leveraging a social media scheduler for their organization. This is typically a seamless way to batch schedule social posts to automatically post while the team is in meetings or working on other projects. Most social media schedulers also provide an analytics feature that has insights that provide demographic and post insights directly into the scheduler platform and across multiple platforms at once. This can be extremely convenient to see in one spot while your scheduling content as well.
Some of my favorite social media schedulers to use is: Social Pilot, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social. Although, there are still a bunch of other tools on the market that may have been missed, and here is a handy resource with other social media analytics tools.
FACEBOOK BUSINESS SUITE
Are you currently leveraging everything that is the Facebook Business Suite? When I first started diving into Facebook, I never realized how many different tools and features they had compared to other social platforms.
Facebook Business Suite is essentially the overview of your business account on Facebook. So think about this as your hub for all-things Facebook Business. For example, within the Facebook Business Suite, you have the ability to schedule future posts, make comments, see social metrics, and even manage Facebook Ads. There is seriously an entire world to explore on the Facebook Business Suite, and that can be really exciting in terms of managing social via Facebook.
Heads Up: Social metrics within the Business Suite are lacking even compared to Facebook Insights via the platform, so I would recommend leveraging the social media planner analytics, or the Facebook Insights in the future as a source of truth. Although, please try out the built in Facebook and Instagram post scheduler built into Business Suite, because it seriously blew my mind as I began working from the Facebook Business Suite across my multiple Business Accounts I manage.
ADS MANAGER
Now, given our industry we all should be leveraging paid social advertising in one way or another. Facebook Ads especially are probably one of the most extensive paid social platforms I have ever worked with, and that is due to their extensive library of user data to help with ad targeting. Needless to say, please start using Facebook Ads, because it is a game changer in my opinion.
Ads Manager is a subset tool of the Business Suite, and essentially allows you to schedule and create your ads that will be displayed on Facebook. If you are running any ads on Facebook, you also gain a panel to view ad performance, which can be insightful for future ads or even posts you plan to leverage in campaign efforts in the future. For example, you gain demographic insights, ad placement locations, along with estimated reach, clicks, and conversion rates of your paid ad.
Now, we are seeing the importance of understanding digital marketing due to the infusion between social media, marketing, analytics, and now digital marketing to be a big mix. This further reinforces how it is great to be adaptable, and able to keep up to date with new tools and technology in order to have more knowledge to apply to new platforms, along with skills that you can apply to various platforms.
EVENTS MANAGER
Last on my list is Events Manager, which I won’t lie in, it is definitely requiring a bit more technical knowledge in terms of adding in code, and some knowledge of event tracking on tools such as Google Tag Manager, or Tealium. Events Manager functions by adding a Facebook Pixel onto your website, and from there you have the ability to track and measure “event” interactions on your website. The Facebook Pixel is a few lines of code from Facebook that you copy into the header section of your website. This code allows the pixel to receive information about the actions taken on your site to make your Facebook ads more relevant to your audience. An event is essentially anything clickable, and examples for events are call-to-action (CTA) buttons, lead gen forms, high-value pageviews, add to cart, or even subscribe to newsletter buttons.
Now what happens after all of this is tracked? Well, let’s use an example of someone who may be a Facebook follower, and then visit our website via our website link we provide. This follower will then navigate to the website, and from there we will start to gain insights on content they view, events they interact with, and more that that Pixel will dump this data collected into a dashboard for us. Although, here is the main point why we added that Facebook Pixel, is that it will allow for retargeting our paid ads to this individual. Retargeting is essentially an advertising practice where you use paid ads in order to target audiences who have visited your website or social media profile.
Now, why is this important? This is extremely important because based off market research done by MailChimp it is found that 97% of individuals who visit a website the first time will leave without buying anything. This is BAD, and we need to lower that percentage through retargeting in order to capture these individuals again in hopes they will buy something a future time they visit the website and perform a goal whether that is filling out our form, making a purchase, or even signing up for something.
THE FUTURE OF FACEBOOK MARKETING METRICS FOR MARKETERS
Facebook Analytics is going away, and truthfully at first it was sad to see the tool go. Although, now I am optimistic seeing this as a chance to work more heavily in other tools such as social media schedulers, Facebook Business Suite, Ads Manager, and even Events Manager.
Marketers have a tough role to play in terms of marketing, social, and digital marketing efforts; and we are at the forefront of these constant changes. The scrappier you are as a marketer, the more of an expert you will become and more marketable if you decide to take on a side hustle or different path in marketing from your current role.
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