Ultimate Guide: How to Use Facebook Insights to Measure Your Fan Page

Once you’ve created and optimized your Facebook page, you might be wondering how successful your page really is. The Facebook Insights dashboard will help you determine how successful your page is at generating likes, visits, clicks, and engagement. It will also help you gauge whether or not your content and engagement strategies are working.

To see your Facebook Insights dashboard, click on the settings icon at the top-right side of your page, and then select View Insights from the drop-down menu.

There are two types of Facebook insights that you can analyze:

• User Insights: Total likes, Friends of fans (this lets you see your potential reach), fan demographics, page visits, like sources
• Interaction Insights: Post activity (likes, shares, comments), people “talking about your page,” people posting to your Timeline

With so much data to look at, it can get a bit overwhelming. Here are the key insights that I recommend you pay attention to, and keep track of on a monthly basis.

1. Monthly fan base growth

Keep track of how many “likes” your page has generated last month on the 1st day of every month. You can see this information right on the Overview tab.

2. Post engagement and virality

See which types of posts are most effective at keeping your fans engaged, as well as sharing your posts with their friends, at the bottom of the Overview tab.

Here’s what each of the columns mean (and keep in mind that Facebook only includes numbers for the first 28 days after a post’s publication):

• Date: The date in which you posted each piece of content
• Post: An excerpt of the post that appeared on your Facebook page
• Reach: The number of unique people who have seen your post
• Engaged Users: The number of people who have clicked on your post. This includes clicks on links AND clicks on people’s names, the timestamp, or the number of likes AND clicks on the Share link (which creates a story on the user’s own Timeline). Click on the number of Engaged Users to see more details.

• Talking About This: The number of people who have created a story from your post. Stories are created when someone likes, comments on, or shares your posts, answers a question you posted, or responds to an event you created. Click on the number of people talking about this to see the breakdown.

• Virality: The percentage of people who have created a story from your post out of the total number of unique people who have seen it.

3. Page “like” source

Ever wonder if you were getting more “likes” on your fan page vs. the like box you added to your blog? Now you can find out. First, click on the Likes tab at the top of the dashboard.

Then scroll down to the section called Where Your Likes Came From.

Here you can see which source generated the most likes:

• On Page: People who liked your page on the page itself
• Like Box and Like Button: People who liked your page by clicking “like” on the like box or like button you’ve added to your website
• Timeline: People who liked your page from the Likes section of someone’s Timeline

• Facebook Recommendations: People who liked your page from a Recommended Pages unit on the right column of the Facebook news feed.

• Search Results: People who liked your page from their Facebook search results

• Page Likes Another Page: Other Facebook pages that have “liked” your page, listing your page as a favorite.

4. Total tab views

Curious to see how many views each of your Facebook tabs have received? You can find that information on the Reach screen. Just select a date range…

Then scroll down to the bottom of the screen to see Total Tab Views. This will show you the number of times each of your tabs was viewed during the date range you selected. Click More to see all of your tabs.

5. Referring traffic sources

Right next to the Total Tab Views section, you’ll see the External Referrers section. This will show you which websites are sending the most traffic to your Facebook fan page. If you’re doing Facebook marketing right on your website, it should be the #1 source of external traffic.

6. Export your data!

Some of the most valuable insights you can get will come from your exported Facebook data. You’ll see the Export button at the top of each screen on your insights dashboard.

Then you can select a time range, and which type of report you’d like to run:

• Page level data – reports on your entire Facebook page during that time range. You’ll see stats like total likes (useful if you didn’t check your like count on the 1st of the month), daily unlikes, friends of fans (so you can see your reach potential), and total impressions.
• Post level data – reports on each individual story posted during that time range. You’ll see stats such as likes, comments, and shares of each post, as well as how much negative feedback each post has received (in the form of hidden or reported stories).

These are the main areas I would recommend paying attention to. There are many other useful (and not-so-useful) stats that Facebook provides, but these are the insights I found most valuable to help determine what my Facebook marketing next-steps should be.

Which Facebook insights do you think are most valuable? Let me know in the comments below!