Accelerate your thought leadership by contributing to our blog. Join our community of experts now!
This data was sourced from just over 25,000 Datablocks used to track Facebook metrics in Databox. (What is a Datablock?)
According to a study by EdgeRanker Checker, the average post on a Facebook Page has a clickthrough rate of 0.15%.
Put another way, a link that you post to your Facebook Page will need an average of 715 impressions to get one click.
Or, 99.85% of viewers will not click your post (on average).
Now, link clicks shouldn’t be the number one goal of your Facebook strategy, as depending on your budget and overall reach, you’d need a massive number of impressions to create any sort of click volume.
(Also, like both Amazon and Google, Facebook continues to evolve its product strategy in an effort to keep more users on the platform rather than click off to third-party websites.)
Consider that Facebook users can indicate their interest–and engage–through a like, reaction, share, or comment. Facebook has a robust analytics tool that allows you to track metrics on a post-by-post basis.
To understand which of these metrics are most popular for measuring the success of a Facebook marketing strategy, we looked at the most-tracked Facebook metrics from Databox users.
In total, that meant analyzing more than 25,000 Facebook metrics being tracked in Databox.
Here are the most-tracked Facebook metrics, with examples for how to track each one with a social media dashboard software.
A Datablock is one block of data that, along with any number of other Datablocks, make up a single dashboard.
They’re customizable, resizable, and many of them are pre-configured so that all users need to do is drag and drop them to their dashboard to quickly visualize data.
All dashboards are made up of Datablocks. Here’s a quick video for how they work…
Want to make sure your Facebook ads are performing and trending in the right direction? There are several types of metrics you should track, from costs to campaign engagement to ad-level engagement, and so on.
Here are a few we’d recommend focusing on.
Tracking these metrics in Facebook Ads Manager can be overwhelming since the tool is not easy to navigate and the visualizations are quite limiting. It’s also a bit time-consuming to combine all the metrics you need in one view.
We’ve made this easier by building a plug-and-play Facebook Ads dashboard that takes your data and automatically visualizes the right metrics to give you an in-depth analysis of your ad performance.
With this Facebook Ads dashboard, you can quickly discover your most popular ads and see which campaigns have the highest ROI, including details such as:
And more…
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Facebook Ads account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
The “page engagements” metrics counts the number of uniques people that have interacted with your brand’s organic Facebook content. That includes anyone who has liked, clicked, commented and shared individual posts. It does not matter if people found those post via their newsfeeds or on the Page itself. It also technically includes people that reach out to your business via Messenger, although that is not common for most brands.
Also important- this is the total number of people that interact, not the total number of interactions.
This gives you an overall view of whether your posts are cutting through the noise of the News Feed. It’s a good holistic measurement of whether you are reaching the 99.85% of people that will not click the link.
Recommended Datablock: Use the line chart with comparisons turned on.
This is the number of people that have “liked” your company’s page in a specified date range.
Likes are analogous to “follows” on Twitter or Instagram or email subscriptions. They are the only organic way to improve the reach of your posts over time. And, Facebook suggests your page in the feeds of people whose friends “like” your page. This creates an even bigger opportunity to reach people in the same demographics as your fans.
Recommended Datablock: A “Compare” datablock that includes page likes and unlikes.
This one is pretty easy- it’s the number of posts published through your page.
Sometimes, you can increase engagement by simply increasing the number of posts per week. Ah, if only it were always that easy. In other cases, you may need to spend less time cranking out volume and more time on creating clever content that will actually earn engagement.
Facebook is protective over News Feeds. If your page shows low engagement over time, it will be harder for you to appear in relevant News Feeds.
Recommended Datablock: Number Datablock with comparisons on.
This is the total number of people that “like” your page.
Hopefully, this is trending upward over time, since your fans must manually click your page to “unlike” it. This is not a direct indicator of the reach of your posts, since past engagement history also plays a significant role.
This can be a significant asset if you plan on running Facebook Ads. You can either serve ads directly to this audience (if you believe they are not already customers), or you can use it to build a lookalike audience.
Recommended Datablock: Line graph with comparisons on.
This is the number of times that your page has been viewed by both logged-in and logged-out individuals. It could mean that people are seeing your posts and trying to learn more about your brand. Or, the page could even rank highly for a branded keyword on Google.
Recommended Datablock: Heatmap.
This is the total number of reactions across all posts in a specified date range. Reactions are usually more common than comments or shares.
Recommended Datablock: Bar graph with comparisons on.
This is the total number of shares across all posts in a specified date range. Although these are usually more valuable than reactions, they are also harder to earn. Facebook users are sensitive about sharing content. Some companies run giveaways in order to motivate sharing.
This is the number of video views over 3 seconds in length across all your videos.
This year (2018), Facebook admitted that it prioritizes video in its algorithm, with extra emphasis on live video. If you can create video content, you have a much better chance of getting to the top of news feeds.
Recommended Datablock- Line graph with comparison on.
This is the total number of comments across all posts in a specified date range.
One way to drive more comments is to ask an open-ended question in your post. But, it will need to be timely and provocative, since viewers will see the questions while they are absentmindedly scrolling through their feed.
Recommended Datablock:Line graph with comparison on.
This is the total number of people that have completed a “consumption event” over the specified date range. What’s a “consumption event”, you ask? Here are the options:
In other words, the clicks that are not “engagements”, which was our #1 metric. Since this is the 10th most popular metric, marketers are reacting to low clickthrough rates by focusing on engagement rather than clicks.
Recommended Datablock: Page summary table with comparisons on.
Okay, so post engagements seem to be the most popular KPI, with 5 of the top 10 metrics falling in that category alone, with a ton of advertisers in this Facebook ads research agreeing as well.
That’s great for social media marketers just trying to start conversations. But, if you are thinking that these metrics seem pretty disconnected from generating revenue, I agree with you. How the heck do page engagements translate to sales?
In our guide to measuring social media ROI, many experts weighed in on that question. Using tools like Google Analytics and HubSpot, most experts suggested something similar to what Jonathan Aufray from Growth Hackers said so succinctly, “You need to make sure the traffic you get from social media is targeted and qualified. Then, you need to find out if those visitors convert into leads and, finally, if those leads convert into sales using a social media dashboard.”
In short, if you’re serious about using Facebook to grow your revenue, you need to use analytics data from other tools too. I’d recommend starting with our free Google Analytics Social Media dashboard.
Do you have any other metrics that are essential for measuring your success as a social media marketer? Let me know in the comments.
Tamara is Content Editorial Manager at Databox. She is an SEO aficionado, a coffee addict, and a huge museum lover! When she's not working or writing, she enjoys visiting an art gallery, drinking her 5th coffee with her friends, or playing video games.
Get practical strategies that drive consistent growth