May 21, 2018
Facebook recently, during its F8 Conference, introduced a few new additions to its Facebook Analytics product that can prove helpful in understanding how people interact across your website, Facebook Page, app, and more.
What is Facebook Analytics you might ask?
It’s an omni-channel analytics tool provided to advertisers inside the Facebook advertising platform. It takes behaviors that Facebook has access to via your Facebook Page, Facebook SDK (for apps), and the Facebook Pixel installed on your website to aggregate insights and package them into an easier to read and understand interface. It’s particularly focused on understanding a user’s journey from initial contact to conversion and measuring more accurately than other cookie-based measurement tools.
You can then use those insights to better inform and optimize your advertising strategy, landing page design, and website in general. There’s a whole lot more to understand in what and how it does what it does, so I’d recommend heading over to the Facebook Analytics page to dig deeper.
So, what was announced at F8 that could be helpful?
There were two specific additions that stood out, automated insights and journeys. Both provide a deeper level of insight into user behavior and help you better understand what people are doing across your different marketing channels.
Let’s see what each has to offer in more detail.
Automated Insights
Automated insights, as the name suggests, is a tool that works behind the scenes to surface insights that might provide useful to you. It can surface insights like in what geographic areas you have a higher rate of conversion or what type of device leads to highest retention. The key is that it does all of this behind the scenes as it analyzes data and automatically pulls out insights for you.
For instance, below are a few basic insights this new tool surfaced in recent weeks within an account:
Some of these could be useful and some of them not, but the key is that they are happening automatically, so you aren’t having to dig through the data yourself. Are these going to replace human analysis any time soon?
No, but they could help surface the occasional useful insight and as the system gets better the insights should improve. It doesn’t hurt to look through what the system is finding and use what you find useful. Checking in on a semi-regular basis is a good idea.
Journeys
Journeys is a tool that provides the paths to conversion across your site, app, Facebook Page, etc. and how they each performed along that path. You can read the announcement about this feature here.
As an omni-channel tool, Journeys can allow you to see what Facebook sees as users interact with your various channels. It can answer questions about those pathways and help us focus our attention in the areas with the most impact.
What kinds of questions might it answer?
- How long on average it takes someone to convert?
- What first interaction leads to the most conversions?
- Do people convert more on mobile or desktop?
- Do people who interact with your Facebook Page convert on your mobile app?
- Do people who interact with your Messenger bot spend more?
These questions and many, many more can be answered by using the data and insights aggregated by the journeys tool. As long as you have the ability to see the data across these channels in Facebook, you can use journeys to inform and diagnose user journey successes and failures.
Conclusion
Automated insights and journeys are interesting tools that add increased value to the overall Facebook Analytics tool. Will they replace human analysis and fix all your user journey woes? No, but they can add value to your analysis and catch things that might be missed.
Consider diving into Facebook Analytics and giving these tools a look. At the very least they help to verify and corroborate insights from other tools.