If you struggle with understanding Facebook analytics in a native solution, and if you feel like your Facebook monthly reporting is always a race against time, this article is for you. 

Let’s take a closer look at Facebook Insights and a Facebook Insights alternative.

Facebook Insights or an alternative tool?

Are you not satisfied enough with Facebook native analytics solutions? Do you consider implementing an alternative tool? It is fitting that we share our comparison infographic which will help you to understand the differences between Facebook Insights and Sotrender, and hopefully, it will facilitate the decision-making process.

In our comparison, we focused on three main areas: the data available in both tools, the possibility to compare results with competitors, and reporting.

Is Facebook analytics enough for you?

Some of the differences between Sotrender and Facebook native solution are visible at first glance, for example, the way of organizing and visualizing the data. 

After logging in to Sotrender, you will see a dashboard with all key results for your profiles. In the case of Facebook, if you’re running a few different profiles and want to check results for particular pages, you need to switch between them, which, in the long run, can be confusing and time-consuming.

On the other hand, Facebook analytics is accessible for free, while Sotrender is a paid tool (besides the 14-day free trial). You might then think that analyzing data solely in a Facebook tool is profitable – at the end of the day, you can save your marketing budget which is, most probably, already limited. But is Facebook Insights indeed enough for your business needs, or maybe you need a reasonable Facebook Insights alternative?

If you decide to use Facebook native solution, you will have access to some basic metrics like page likes, posts’ and stories’ reach, impressions and particular posts’ statistics. But you should know that this data is limited, especially if you seek complex analytics and need a well-thought, data-based strategy to improve your business performance. In such a case, it is worth considering Facebook Insights alternatives.

Why? For example, in the Facebook tool, you can’t find data regarding the effectiveness of the content that you publish, you are not able to check a community ranking or analyze comment sentiment. It is also impossible to track your overall engagement, while all this data is crucial to building better connections with your audience.

It’s also not a secret that Facebook Insights is not bug-free and you may experience data inaccuracies. With this not always a fully reliable source of data, fulfilling your daily work duties may be simply disrupted.

Let’s take a look at some more features and data that are not accessible in Facebook Insights, but can be found in an alternative social media analytics tool. 

Monitor competitors’ activities

It is hard to learn if you’re running your Facebook profiles in the right way if you cannot make any references. That is why it is really important to monitor your competitors’ activities, and Sotrender perfectly knows how to do that.

Do you know the tone in which competitive brands communicate? Do you have an idea which of their posts evoke the biggest engagement on Facebook?

It is hard to create a successful marketing strategy without analyzing the activities of competitive brands. Thanks to such analysis, not only can you check what kinds of activities are the most effective for your competitors (for example the types of posts that they publish), but you can also identify the gaps in your strategy and adjust it accordingly. While many marketers skip benchmarking activities, this is actually how you can get the ball rolling.

But, all in all, this is not the only comparison that you should pay attention to. If you’re running a few different profiles, it is good to compare the results between them and evaluate which of the activities that you carry out bring the best results. The possibility to create comparison groups is another facilitation that Sotrender aims to offer, and it really helps to evaluate your overall performance.

As you probably know, Facebook Insights won’t give you access to such data. 

Compare your ad results – yours and your competitors

Besides the organic results, in Sotrender Ads, which is an extra module to Sotrender, you can also compare paid results – for both your and your competitors’ profiles.

The results for your ad account can be checked on three levels: ad level, ad set level and campaign level. On each of them, you can analyze a bunch of metrics, such as reach, CPC, CPM, conversions or impressions.

In Sotrender Ads, you can also access a unique Audience Share metric, which provides a percentage number of your target audience that actually received your advertising message.

Another crucial feature available in Sotrender Ads’ offering is ads benchmarking which enables you to check monthly average advertising results in 25 different industries. This way you can get an idea of how much, on average, marketers in your or similar industry invest in advertising. As a result, it will be easier for you to plan and optimize your own advertising budget.

In Sotrender Ads you can also compare your campaign spend with competitors’ advertising spend by campaign type. This is a very simple way to learn what types of campaigns seem the most profitable for your competitors, meaning: in which campaign types they invest the biggest amounts of money.

Benchmarking in Sotrender Ads

Create reports in minutes

In a marketer’s job, as in many other jobs, some tasks can be automated, and such automation usually leads to great time-saving.

Another Sotrender advantage over a native solution is the possibility of generating quick reports in various formats. The data is visualized on charts and it is easy to understand. At the same time, Facebook enables you to generate only a raw summary report in two formats: xls or csv.

Additionally, in Sotrender you can create a comparison report for selected profiles. Thanks to that, you can speedily generate a report that summarizes your competitors’ activities. With legible data presented on colorful charts, you can easily analyze your results and talk them over with your team or a boss.

Sotrender or Facebook Insights?

As you can see, an alternative tool offers a lot of extra features that can significantly facilitate Facebook data analysis. The truth is, if you’re at the beginning of creating your very first business profile on Facebook, the metrics available in native solutions might seem enough, but over time, and with the growth of your page, you will most probably need a more complex solution.

In the end, we would like to highlight Sotrender’s friendly & easily accessible support which can be of help in case of any doubts or questions that you might have. Whenever you seek an explanation of particular features or simply need some tips to use the app’s full potential, just let us know. We will be happy to help!

Want to know what our clients think about Sotrender and how it helped them with their day-to-day tasks? Check out our G2 reviews. 🙂