When Facebook first launched in 2004, no one could have predicted its meteoric rise to one of the largest tech giants in the world. Yet here we are, with over 2.9 billion monthly active users.
As a business owner trying to market products or services on Facebook in 2024, you likely already know the immense money-making potential it offers. In fact, the ROI from Facebook ads is the highest among social media platforms.
However, successfully navigating Facebook's ever-changing algorithms, floods of data, and sheer saturation of ads is no easy feat. One day your campaign is thriving, earning clicks and conversions. The next, it sinks without a trace, and you're left bewildered as to why.
This is where leveraging the right Facebook analytics tools can provide game-changing insight. In this article, we'll dive into Facebook Analytics and show you the top tools to help you crush your marketing goals in 2024.
Before diving into the tools themselves, it's essential to level-set: what exactly is Facebook analytics? In simple terms, Facebook analytics refers to the data available to track and assess your Facebook page or ad account's performance.
Monitoring these numbers over time can give insights into how your audience interacts with your content and help you measure your progress toward marketing campaign goals.
For example, a small business launching a new product might use Facebook analytics to assess:
Without analytics, it would be near impossible for a business to determine if its launch strategy was successful.
The problem often arises when business pages become inundated with so much Facebook data that it becomes difficult to analyze it all.
The list of available Facebook metrics you can track is extensive. Several vital ones provide an accurate pulse check for the health of your campaigns. These include:
With so many active buyers on Facebook, there's immense value in utilizing analytics to understand your audience. Data shows that data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, according to McKinsey.
Facebook analytics empower you to segment users by demographics, interests, behaviors, and more. That means you can create highly targeted ads and content tailored to their preferences. For example, an athletic wear brand might target women ages 20-40 who are interested in yoga and CrossFit.
Plus, this data can help you keep your current customers coming back for more. You can give them more of what they love by seeing what they respond to. In short, Facebook analytics enables you to intimately understand your ideal customers. Acting on these insights gives your brand an unbeatable edge.
Since Facebook retired its analytics tool on June 30, 2021, many businesses felt stuck without a way to measure performance. Thankfully, third-party solutions gracefully picked up the slack. The main benefits of using an external Facebook analytics tool include:
Rather than toggling between interfaces, tools consolidate data from Facebook, Instagram, ads, and other sources for a single source of truth.
Advanced visualizations like charts make complex statistics digestible. Trends become crystal clear.
Tailor reports with specific KPIs, date ranges, metrics, and more to align analysis to your goals.
Automatically generate reports on schedules to effortlessly track performance over time.
As Facebook marketing grows increasingly sophisticated, the analytics tools have evolved in parallel. Based on in-depth testing by our team, we curated the top 5 ecommerce analytics tools for sellers on Facebook in 2024.
One overlooked area of Facebook analytics lies in understanding not just your own metrics, but your competitor's performance. Enter Varos. This analytics platform enables real-time Facebook ads benchmarking against industry peers to accelerate growth. Here's why our approach works so well.
By aggregating and anonymizing data from over 3,000 ecommerce sites, Varos benchmarks your campaign metrics against realistic standards. You gain context for your results rather than shooting in the dark.
Varos tracks essential KPIs like CPC, CPM, CTR, engagement rate, etc. You instantly spot underperforming areas to focus optimization efforts correctly. Anomaly explanations reveal the "why" behind unusual performance swings. Varos equips you to address issues and capitalize on successes.
With industry-leading data security protecting your accounts, you can feel at ease entrusting campaign transparency to Varos for superior insights.
While Varos is all about analytics, Sprout Social is more of a jack-of-all-trades. It may not have quite as many analytical bells and whistles, but it makes up for it with content management features.
Centralized inboxes compile messages across connected platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Respond without toggling windows. Scheduling queues simplify social coordination with one calendar view.
On the data side, Sprout Social lets you track engagement in real time. That means you can see how many likes, comments, and shares your posts get as they happen. Or look through your Facebook group analytics. You can also keep tabs on all the key Facebook metrics we discussed earlier.
For example, an athletic wear company can filter video metrics for its spin class promo across platforms or analyze follower demographics on Instagram vs. Facebook.
Just keep in mind that the best advanced analytics reports are only available on the priciest plan. But Sprout Social says its tool can cut report prep time by 75%, saving you around $39,000, so it might be worth considering.
Next up, we've got Brand24. This tool is all about social media monitoring with a side of AI-powered insights.
Brand24 works with all the heavy hitters. You can use it with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, TikTok, Reddit, Quora, Telegram, and Twitch. It can track mentions of your brand even if you're not tagged, so you can see how far your reach goes.
With AI and Natural Language Processing, Brand24 can tell you how people feel about your brand. Sentiment analysis will tell you whether that's positive, negative, or neutral. Volume, reach, share of voice, and more compile into intuitive reports.
You can also do a competitive analysis to see how you stack up against other brands in terms of share of voice and brand awareness. Brand24 serves up all this info in easy-to-digest, AI-powered reports complete with a Reputation Score and Presence Score.
Buffer takes a broader approach to social media management suitable for solopreneurs rather than ecommerce powerhouses. While light in Facebook advanced analytics, Buffer nails down scheduling, idea curation, and basic performance tracking.
Intuitive calendars make coordinating a consistent social media presence effortless. Plus, Buffer suggests ideal posting times per platform backed by data science. Speaking of data, Buffer Analyze studies your performance history and recommends tactics to improve results.
If you're seeking advanced analytics and visualizations, Buffer may come up short. Yet, its simplicity could suit social media rookies.
We'd be remiss not to finish this list with Meta's official analytics tool. Meta Business Suite ties directly into Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Natively built by the social media giant, expect seamless user experiences between platforms under one umbrella system.
But perhaps the biggest draw of this solution is that it's one of the only completely free Facebook analytics tools.
Monitor follower growth, engagement rates, reach, website clicks, and more from one dashboard. Or utilize existing Meta tools like Ads Manager without disruptive toggling.
The main drawback is that it has less robust features than paid competitors. But for basic analytics without extra fees, Meta Business Suite hits the spot.
While the tools provide invaluable data, optimizing your strategy is equally essential for Facebook's marketing success.
Every great campaign starts with a clear target. What do you want to achieve? More sales? More followers? More engagement? Whatever it is, make sure your goals are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
These goals inform the metrics and benchmarks you track. Without goals, you lack the context to interpret performance.
Grasping who engages with your brand allows catering content accordingly. Facebook analytics and Audience Insights offer demographic and interest data to capitalize on.
There's no one-size-fits-all solution. What works for one business might not work for another. That's why it's important to play around with different tools and features. Test options like Varos for competitor analysis or Sprout Social for consolidated messaging.
Experiment until you find the best analytics process for your workflow.
The only way to determine ideal posting schedules, ad formats, targeting, creatives, and more is through continual A/B testing. Analyze performance data, hypothesize better options, systematically test them against the status quo, and implement what reliably works best.
Finally, we cannot understate the importance of remaining agile when it comes to your Facebook analytics strategy. Complacency kills campaigns. As such, you want to continually reassess according to the latest trends and algorithm changes.
Ask questions like:
The future of Facebook marketing shines bright, but only for those willing to embrace data analytics for smarter decision-making. We hope this overview of the top tools and best practices illuminates the path ahead.
Now is the time to gain an advantage and achieve explosive growth. Want to see competitor benchmarking analytics in action? Book a free Varos demo today.
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Bottom line: I’m recommending Varos to you all because it’s FREE (for now) and it’s already added a ton of value for myself and my clients.Check it out 👇
I would definitely recommend checking out Varos. With Varos you can easily see how your peers are performing, for free. You get insights into not only TikTok Ads benchmarks, but also similar data for Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and more. #VarosAmbassador
Varos allows thousands merchants to upload anonymize marketing data across meta and google and aggregating it to show what the average is across different categories and ad spend
With varos.com, I can see exactly how our performance across channels stacks up against our competitors in our space.
Compare your ad performance to benchmarks of companies just like yours, anonymously.
I would've killed for this tool years ago and now it's here and oh it's free. Amazing.
I've been seeing some content about @Varos_com so we decided to check it out.
One underrated feature of theirs is the Shopify Benchmarking, which is FREE btw.
Literally impossible to access this data anywhere else. Check out what we're seeing at @my_obvi 👇
I'm loving what @Varos_com is doing with providing much more relevant benchmarks for #ecommerce... especially since it shows that we are absolutely DOMINATING @Elumynt on #facebookads!
This is in the Baby and Children vertical.#fbads #ppcchat #retail #dtc
Bottom line: I’m recommending Varos to you all because it’s FREE (for now) and it’s already added a ton of value for myself and my clients.Check it out 👇
I would definitely recommend checking out Varos. With Varos you can easily see how your peers are performing, for free. You get insights into not only TikTok Ads benchmarks, but also similar data for Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and more. #VarosAmbassador
Varos allows thousands merchants to upload anonymize marketing data across meta and google and aggregating it to show what the average is across different categories and ad spend
With varos.com, I can see exactly how our performance across channels stacks up against our competitors in our space.
Compare your ad performance to benchmarks of companies just like yours, anonymously.
I would've killed for this tool years ago and now it's here and oh it's free. Amazing.
I've been seeing some content about @Varos_com so we decided to check it out.
One underrated feature of theirs is the Shopify Benchmarking, which is FREE btw.
Literally impossible to access this data anywhere else. Check out what we're seeing at @my_obvi 👇
I'm loving what @Varos_com is doing with providing much more relevant benchmarks for #ecommerce... especially since it shows that we are absolutely DOMINATING @Elumynt on #facebookads!
This is in the Baby and Children vertical.#fbads #ppcchat #retail #dtc
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