Are your Facebook Analytics Accurate & How To Verify Your Results?
Would you like to figure out your social media analytics, so you can determine what content is working and what content is falling flat with your audience?
Taking some time each month to review your Facebook analytics is a great way to see if what you’re posting is getting engagement and helping you build brand awareness. This week we’re talking about the analytics that are provided on your Facebook business page.
In this week’s episode of The Wellness Business Podcast, you’ll discover:
- 5 ways to troubleshoot your Facebook analytics so you can improve your link clicks and overall engagement
- Our recommendation for digging into your own analytics and how often you should do it
- The best way to verify what the analytics are telling you if you think there is a reporting problem
Let’s dig in!
Karen recently had a coach post this question:
‘So, my reach and engagement numbers are increasing incrementally every month. EXCEPT that there are 0 link clicks?!! What?! I have a CTA at the end of almost every post, different ones depending on what it is about. But does this basically mean, my freebie(s) are NOT working. I mean, a lot of these are educational. But still. 0 link clicks is depressing for all this work.’
This is such a great question. First, we want to give this coach kudos for taking the time to look at her analytics. Numerical data is always the quickest way to know if things are working or not. Even if you sit down for 15-20 minutes once per month you’ll gain a world of knowledge to help you make future decisions.
In her case she reached 2.4k people with her posts in the past 28 days and had 1.5k engagements. That’s amazing! It’s a 63% engagement rate.
The problem comes in because the data is also showing that she has had zero link clicks. She’s consistent with putting her freebies out there, so she’s wondering if is it true that no one is clicking?
If you’re reviewing your analytics and finding similar results we’re going to share with you 5 ways to troubleshoot so you can improve your link clicks.
We’re going to unpack how to verify your own analytics as well as share more about this coach’s story.
1. The first thing that we want you to consider is whether or not the iOS updates that happened last year are skewing your numbers. Anytime a link takes someone off of Facebook there is the potential for false reporting since that update. This is an unfortunate reality but one we have to deal with, so we need to find other ways to verify our results.
We did an episode earlier this year where we talked about the iOS update and 5 Ways to Overcome the Email Open Tracking Issue Due to the iOS15 Update. It was episode 244 so if you haven’t listened to it yet we recommend doing so.
2. The second step is to check your email management system to see if you are getting new subscribers. In the case of this coach, she had 9 new subscribers but didn’t have a way of knowing where they came from. She posts on several platforms and always uses the same link, so she wasn’t able to know for sure if they came from Facebook or somewhere else.
If you do the same thing, we recommend checking to see if your email management system allows you to create individual links for each platform you post on. It’s a fabulous way to improve your overall tracking. In the case of this coach, the great news is that she was getting new subscribers so something she was doing is working.
3. Step 3 in figuring out if your analytics are accurate would be to look at the reach for each individual post. What is the reach for each post compared to your overall number of followers? Are you including a specific call-to-action so your followers know exactly what they should do? This coach said she is adding a call-to-action in her posts so that’s perfect. The question is whether or not the posts that are sharing her freebie link is getting much less reach than her other posts so looking at individual post analytics will help answer that question? Get familiar with your data, see what trends are being reported based on your specific audience, and do your best to verify the information. If you have Google Analytics installed on your website, you can use the data being collected there to verify where the traffic is coming from.
4. Step 4 is to determine if there are certain types of posts, (let’s say quotes over blog or freebies), that seem to consistently get more reach than others? Often times Facebook will limit the reach of a post that has a link going outside of the Facebook platform. It’s important to know what your specific analytics look like for the different post types. Again, if you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your website platform it’s a great way to monitor your traffic. There are lots of training tutorials on YouTube showing you how to install it based on the platform you use. Just type in, “How to install Google Analytics on a _________ website.”
5. Step 5 to improve your analytics and engagement would be asking your audience what they want to hear from you. Find out what they want more of and what they want less of. Never be afraid to ask what they like better – option A or B). It’s important to switch things up and try new things to see if your analytics reflect an increase in engagement. People love to give their opinion and by creating a post with an A or B answer it will likely get more reach and engagement than other types of posts. You can track that with your analytics as well to determine if you should make it a regular part of your posting strategy.
There you have it, 5 ways to troubleshoot your Facebook analytics so you can improve your link clicks and overall engagement. We recommend that you set 15-20 minutes aside on your calendar this week to dig into your analytics.
Let us know how it goes!
Subscribe and listen to The Wellness Business Podcast on your favorite platform!
