How to Build a Detailed Facebook Insights Report

Our goal with this article is to guide you in creating your very own Facebook insights report for your own page or the one you manage for a client.

Aside from the report creation process, we also want to get you acquainted with the right metrics to track. Facebook Insights boasts tons of data - keeping your eye on these social media metrics that matter could pose some challenges. Let's take care of this problem.

The marketing insights you acquire via Facebook also need to be organized. So in addition to knowing what to track, we want to make sure you are presenting the data in a way that's easy to digest. 

Let’s begin. 

What Facebook Insights Metrics You Should Track?

There is an array of metrics on your Facebook Insights report, which provide you with a page performance assessment. Let's have a look at each particular metric that could matter to you and your overall digital marketing efforts.

Post Reach and Impressions

Starting off with the basics – post reach and impression counts.

Many people actually make the mistake when it comes to differentiating these two key metrics, which can cause some issues down the road. Especially when gauging the effectiveness of your Facebook page performance.

Impressions are the number of times your particular page or post has been seen. The content may be seen by the same person multiple times. Each contact, regardless if it’s unique or not, is counted as an impression in Facebook data.

Reach is the total number of unique individuals who have seen your content.

One thing to consider is the sub-metrics of reach and impressions. These are the following KPIs: post-reach, post-impression, page-reach and page-impressions. 

Post-impression is a metric that shows the number of page followers that have seen a particular post. Post-reach works similarly to post-impression, the only difference is that it counts unique page follower views. 

Now, let's dig deeper just a bit more into impressions and reach:

3 Types of Impressions and Reach

Organic, paid, and viral – these are the 3 different types of impressions and reach.

Organic impressions show how many times the content was viewed on your page directly. Paid impressions are the number of times your content was viewed as a paid ad. Viral impressions are the number of times that piece of content was viewed when a user reposted it on their Facebook story.

Viral impressions also count share views and page views from people commenting on the content and generating impressions on their walls.

Organic, paid, and viral reach works much like impressions for all types of posts including Facebook ads. However, it counts only unique content views. 

Post and page engagement 

Engagement rate depicts the number of times individuals took some sort of action – whether it’s on your page or on your post. 

Keep in mind that engagement metrics – positive or negative – are lumped in together. 

Here are the positive post engagement metrics that are usually seen as a favorable interaction between users and your post:

• Reacting to your post (any reaction);
• Shares;
• Comments;
• Saving a link from a post.

And here are the negative ones: 

• Reported post;
• Hiding the post;
• Unfollowing the page which posted the content;

Now, let's have a look at the page engagement metrics. We’ll start off with the positive page engagement metrics:

• Engaging with a story you publish on your page;
• Sharing a page story;
• Leaving comments on stories;
• Responding to events you create on your page;
• Answering questions on your stories.

The negative ones are: 

• Hiding all posts from your page;
• Hiding your published story;
• Reporting your page for whatever reason (ie. spam, misleading, scam.);
• Unliking your page.

Things to consider when creating analytics reports or reporting the performance of a particular post or page – engagement aggregation.

Interactions with your post – as well as share interactions – are combined. You have the option to break down each interaction to see who pressed "like", "love" "angry" or view the number of comments. 

Likes, follows and demographic data of your page

If you are the proprietor of a Facebook business page or have made a Facebook page to build a community of like-minded individuals, these metrics are essential. 

Page metrics – new likes, unlikes and follows – have a direct impact on the previously mentioned ones. As your page grows, so does the potential for quality impressions.

When people like your page, they automatically become page followers, too. Whenever you post something on the page, users that follow you will see your content piece on their page.  

People that like your page can, however, 'unfollow' your page. In statistics, they’ll show up as an 'audience' but won’t see your posts in their feed and your organic reach will tank.

To prevent people from unfollowing you, create content compelling enough to attract engagement. This could cause a dip in your audience to impression ratio. And, it could be particularly important when creating your Facebook Insights reports.

Page demographic dimensions are also available for you: age, gender, location, and language. These metrics can also be attributed to those demographic dimensions as well: 20 page likes, from Dublin, Ireland, for example.

Analyzing your video analytics

With Facebook being one of the top video content hosting platforms, chances are, video analytics will be important to you, too.

Facebook boasts many video metrics for you to track. The main metric is video views. However, these views can be separated into more granular metrics:

• Total video views;
• Unique video views:
• Number of clicks that led to views;
• Organic number of seconds viewed;
• Paid number of seconds viewed;
• Auto-play number of seconds viewing.

Since we’ve covered the brunt of all Facebook metrics, it’s time to get the data organized. All this data needs to be turned into actionable reports that tell a story about your Facebook marketing performance.

Actionable Facebook Insights reports make campaign performance assessment easy and improve future campaign development.

Building your very own Facebook Insights Reports

Now we’re going to put all that data into easy-to-grasp, yet comprehensive visual reports. After all, this data is only useful if you can deduce actionable information.

Who is the recipient of your Facebook Insights Reports?

Consider this important question: Who will be the target recipient of your reports? Your answer will determine how your Facebook reports will look like and what kind of reporting tool you use. 

We’ve taken the time to create a reporting walkthrough that would satisfy an internal marketing team’s needs. It will contain some deep engagement metrics, conversion rates, top-performing posts of the month, and other page insights.

The report needs to be structured in a way that it tells a story. In the example below, the report is divided into 3 pages, and each page aims at addressing a particular need.

Let's start with the questions that the report should answer: 

Page 1: A Basic Overview

1. What does the Facebook page advertising funnel look like? What are the conversion rates of your page like? Are there any changes in metrics since last month?
2. Which form of reach has performed the best? What is the total reach of posts?
3. What is the amount of traffic that comes to my website from my Facebook page?

Page 2: Page Demographic Analytics

1. The most prevalent age group of our followers and those who engaged with our content.
2. Most common gender of those who engaged with our content.

Page 3: Analysing our content posts

1. Our most engaging content type;
2. Most common engagement type (like, comment, share);
3. The most popular post we published.

These questions will help create a foundation upon which we build our Facebook Insights reports. The questions above will be answered with the help of in-depth visuals and widgets.

Page 1: Basic Overview

The first page – a basic overview of weekly Facebook page performance. This page and the report were built in Whatagraph, but you may consider other Facebook analytics tools.

In the example above, we’ve included the general page insights and data that’s been generated in a week. This is a great way to start off a Facebook page performance report. It gives a great overview of impressions and how metrics changed in relation to last week.

You can even break down the type of reach – organic and paid – and view the fluctuation in relation to the previous reporting period.

Page 1 will contain a basic overview of how your Facebook page content performs. Report pages following this dive deeper into each type of metric and each individual content piece you've uploaded during the reporting period.

If we take a look at these general overview metrics, we get a quick glimpse at the overall engagement trends for a specific time period.

Page 2: Demographic analysis

Page demographics aim to deduce the type of audience that’s interacting with your produced content. These metrics are great to look at because it shows how effective you are at reaching your target demographic.

Let's say you're promoting car parts on your page – your target demographic is men, ages 25-40. When you view your report and see the rapid growth of women viewing your page, that could indicate that the way you present your brand, and the content you create doesn't appeal to men as it should. 

Page 3: Post analytics

Now we’ve reached the last page of our Facebook Page report. Here we’re going deep into the nitty-gritty of content engagement. Page 3 of the report aims to showcase types of popular content and exact audience engagement.

You’ll see the most popular actions your viewers are taking when they encounter your content. You’ll also find out what were the best-performing posts.  

Different types of content you upload on your page – links, images, text, video – should be segmented, allowing you to see what content type performs the best with the Facebook algorithm. This is a great way to find out what content to eliminate so you could focus your efforts on the content that pleases your audience most.

In the example above, you can see a bar graph indicating the type of content that generated the most engagement. The 2 graphs for each content category show changes in engagement numbers in relation to the previous reporting period.

Post reactions on the right, show the type of reactions your content garners from the audience. Having this data on hand gives you a detailed look at how exactly your audience reacts to the content on your Facebook page.

Amazingly enough, Whatagraph reports will even extract the best-performing posts from your Facebook page. You even get to see the visuals and the message that were published and all of the engagement metrics.

Having such a clear view of your best-performing content pieces in the report helps further develop future campaigns. You get to see exactly what keeps your audience interested, engaged, and active on your page.

You’ve made it! Time to deliver your report 

We’ve finally come to an end: your three-page Facebook Insights report is done and ready to go.

We covered the essential metrics: what they mean, what should be tracked, and what must be showcased in the report. These 3 pages are essential for effective data dissemination without overburdening your audience with unnecessary numbers that can create confusion rather than insight.

You are welcome to try out our pre-built Facebook Page Insights report template for free. The report is already built for you, just connect your Facebook account and your data will be extracted automatically.

Feel free to sign up for a free trial of Whatagraph - no need to grab your credit card or worry about pricing - it's free to use for a week before purchase.