With Facebook becoming increasingly pay-to-play for brands, the significance of analyzing brand performance has only gained importance. Facebook Page Insights provides multiple metrics and pieces of analytics data to help drive strategic marketing decisions. If you have admin access to your business page, then you can access regular Facebook Insights by navigating to the “Insights” tab in the Page Manager (note that a minimum of 30 likes is required for you to get Facebook Insights for your page).

The Facebook Insights dashboard is divided into 6 sections and provides exhaustive analysis on your page performance. The sections are as follows:
• Overview
• Likes
• Reach
• Visits
• Posts
• People

Before we get into details of each section, you need to know about the Date Slider -- it’s available for Likes, Reach and Visits tabs and provides a smooth and easy way to visualize your page performance over a specific time period. Once you choose the date range using the slider, all the graphs will change to show data for that period. Date ranges can also be selected by setting start and end dates in the calendar. Facebook Insights also provides deep drill downs for any particular date through simple clicks on the graph. Now, for more about each section.

Overview

In this section you will be able to see the total value, as well as a graphical representation, of this week’s performance against the last week for the following metrics:
• Page Likes: Total Pages Likes is the number of unique people who like your page. New Page Likes shows the number of new likes your page received during the last 7 days, compared with the previous 7-day period.
• Post Reach:  Total Reach is the number of unique people who have seen any content associated with your page, including ads, during the last 7 days. Post Reach shows the number of unique people who have seen your page posts.
• Engagement: People Engaged is the number of unique people who have clicked, liked, commented on or shared your posts during the last 7 days. Likes, Comments, Shares and Post Clicks show the totals for these actions during the last 7 days.
• Your 5 Most Recent Posts:  You will be also able to see stats on the last 5 posts, with information on post type, reach, and engagement.

Likes

“Likes” analyzes the number of people who liked your page and shows any changes to help you understand rising or falling of total likes. The section is broken down by 3 graphs:
• Total Page Likes: Displays your page’s total likes to date.
• Net Likes: Displays the total number of likes (paid/organic) and unlikes for a given date range.
• Where Your Page Likes Happened from: This section shows how the page likes were gained (e.g., on your page, page suggestions, mobile, your posts, etc.).

Reach

Facebook reach is the number of unique people who saw the content on their News Feed. Reach is really important, as it affects all other metrics such as likes, comments, shares, clicks, etc.

The Reach section is also broken down by 4 graphs or subsections:
• Post Reach: Shows the number of people who saw a specific post in their news feed via organic or paid reach.
• Likes, Comments, and Shares: Shows the number of people who engaged with a post through actions likes, comments or shares.
• Hide, Report as Spam, and Unlikes: This section is a graphical representation of the number of people who have taken action that represents disengagement, such as clicking the Hide, Report as Spam or Unlike buttons.
• Total Reach: Total Reach represents total page reach which is the total number of people who saw any activity from the business page that includes posts, ads, Check in’s, mentions or other people posting on the page.

Visits

This section shows what section of the page fans interact the most with (e.g., Timeline, Photos, etc.).

The Facebook Visits section is broken down by 2 graphs or subsections:
• Page and Tab Visits: This section shows you the number of times your various page tabs (including your photos tab, info tab, timeline, etc.) were viewed.
• External Referrers: This section provides details about how people found the page from outside Facebook -- for example, through search engines like Google.

Posts

The page post section give details about the times audience members are online, along with the post types, reach and engagement and top performing post from competitions’ pages.
• When Your Fans Are Online: This section gives weekly overview of time when fans of your page are online.
• Types of Post: This section gives details about different post types -- Photo, Link, Status, and Offer -- and corresponding reach and engagement.
• Top Posts from Pages You Watch: Check out this section to gain insights about the post performance from other pages that your page follows.
• All Published Posts: This section lists out all posts in chronological order, type, reach and engagement. Click on the post to get details about the engagement received on each post.

People

The people section of Facebook Insights provides details about audience -- age, gender, demographics and the location they are accessing your page from.
• Your Fans: This section shows your fans by age, gender, geography and language.
• People Reached: This section provides information on the segment of total fans reached by age and gender.
• People Engaged: This section provides information on the segment of total fans engaged by age and gender.

Facebook Insights is a powerful tool that helps social media managers to understand how people respond to the brand and provides detailed information that would help to make informed decisions and devise strategies that would help reach more customers.

Analyzing Facebook Page Insights regularly can help you to capitalize on what works and what doesn’t for your page. The plethora of data points and metrics may seem a little overwhelming to begin with, but over time you’ll get them down. And if you really want a true analysis for calculating ROI from your Facebook page, don’t stop at Page Insights: connect your site to Google Analytics to learn more about the traffic to your website.

As always, there are no strict rules to managing a high performing Facebook page, as this is an ever evolving platform and our strategies need to evolve along with the trends. But hopefully this guide helps in the meantime!