Facebook is a huge ecosystem and every brand can use it in many ways to promote its offerings. There are Facebook Pages, groups, ads, and many other formats. One usually can’t use them all, not to mention tracking the effectiveness of all those efforts.
Nevertheless, if you’re a person responsible for your brand’s Facebook presence, you should be the one to define how your company’s social media success will be measured. That all leads to choosing key Facebook metrics that you’ll be monitoring on a daily, or monthly, basis.
Let’s talk about a few of them. We don’t want you to become overwhelmed, that’s why we’ll focus on seven indicators that we find crucial:
7 Facebook metrics you should track in 2024
Reach
Hello, 2024, a year in which marketers would rather not report the all-time declining reach. 😉
Unfortunately, we can’t change reality, and even though the organic reach is not satisfying for many of us, reach is usually a metric that marketers simply have to report.
Organic reach is one thing, but there are also other types of reach – paid reach and viral reach. Would you like to increase the total reach on your Facebook Page? You can obviously start investing in Facebook Ads. And honestly, that’s what Facebook is pushing all brands and marketers to do.
How to measure reach?
There are several places in which you can find your reach metric. Usually, marketers are choosing either Facebook Insights or one of the external social media analytics apps.
If you decide to head over to one of the social media analytics tools, for example, Sotrender, checking your reach will be pretty easy, as you’ll get this number almost automatically after connecting your profile to the app.
Measuring Facebook reach in Sotrender
Apart from checking your total reach, you can also monitor paid, viral and organic reach day by day. This is pretty useful especially if you need to analyze specific campaigns.
Monitoring reach day by day
Measure your reach in Sotrender >>>
Impressions
Another metric, which is similar to reach, but not the same, is impressions. What is the difference between them?
By analyzing the number of impressions, you’ll learn how many times, in total, the content on your profile (or each of your posts) was seen.
Example:
If Mary opens one post three times, each time will be counted in the total number of impressions. At the same time, in the total reach number, Mary will be counted only once, as the metric counts unique users only. That’s why, in the same time period, the number of impressions is usually higher than reach.
How to measure impressions?
In social media analytics apps, impressions, exactly as reach, can be monitored both for your organic posts as well as for ads. What is more, when analyzing your organic performance in Sotrender, you can also analyze viral impressions.
Monitoring the number of impressions in Sotrender
Check the number of impressions >>>
Side note
Reach and impressions, as insights metrics, can be analyzed only for the profiles that you have access to. In general, it is possible, though, to analyze quite a few metrics for competitors’ profiles, too, however, reach and impressions are not one of them.
Reach demographics
Audience demographics is a type of data that we all know, and it’s important because it informs who your Facebook fans actually are. At the same time, it reach demographics isn’t something that all marketers are aware of. And it’s an even more important piece of data.
Reach demographics, as you most probably can guess, tells who you managed to reach with your communication. It’s important because your follower base may not be changing that dynamically, but at the same time, you may be reaching more and more new users with completely different demographics.
If you’re reaching slightly different users than you thought you were, here is what you can do:
- Revise your communication strategy and targeting and adjust them so that they better correspond with your ideal target audience.
- Use your new audience as a reason to expand your business. Alter your products or create new ones that will be a nod towards them.
How to analyze reach demographics?
Let’s use the Sotrender example once again, to show you how beneficial it is to use an external analytical app. All is done automatically for you. 😉
Just head over to the Audience section in the left-side menu and select Reach demographics.
Reach demographics in Sotrender
Check your reach demographics >>>
Engagement
Engagement is not the easiest Facebook metric to track as nowadays users may engage with your content and Facebook Page in many ways. At the same time, engagement is what marketers should fight for, as it can have a huge impact on the overall marketing and sales success of your company.
How can you easily measure your Facebook engagement?
There are many ways of measuring and tracking engagement. Let’s focus today on one metric that you most probably haven’t heard about.
At Sotrender, we’ve formulated a special metric called Interactivity Index (InI), which measures the total engagement on a specific profile.
What is important is that when calculating InI, we assign different weights to different types of user activity:
- Like (or other reaction) = 1
- Comment = 4
- Post (text, status, multimedia, etc) = 12
- Share = 16
Some activities are basically more valuable than others. For example, a share means that the user was highly engaged with the content he saw, that’s why shares have a much higher weight when calculating InI.
Use the Interactivity Index metric to measure your Facebook engagement
Check your Interactivity Index >>>
Pro tip
By using Sotrender’s Interactivity Index, you can monitor not only the engagement on your own profile but also on competitors’ profiles. With the Relative Interactivity Index, you can precisely compare engagement on various profiles.
CPC & CPM
Let’s now talk a little bit about some KPIs used to measure ad performance.
Cost-related metrics – like cost per mile, cost per click, cost per conversion, cost per result – are one of the most often tracked and reported metrics. It’s no wonder, as they help to understand if setting a specific campaign was worth it and how much did you spend for a specific user action.
How to measure CPC & CPM?
Analyzing your CPM or CPC is pretty easy. In theory, the lower the costs are, the better. When it comes to the raw numbers, you can find them in the Facebook Ads Manager panel.
However, it’s better to analyze CPC or CPM in a more in-depth way, for example, along with other metrics (like spend). A good practice is also comparing cost-related Facebook metrics from different campaigns to each other.
Here, Sotrender comes in handy, again. On the combo charts, you can easily track relations between metrics, such as:
- spend and reach,
- spend and link clicks,
- spend and engagement,
- spend and conversion.
Monitor cost-related metrics in Sotrender
It’s a great way to find out which campaigns were actually the most effective.
Analyze your ads performance >>>
Audience Share
Another indicator that you should be tracking in order to analyze the effectiveness of your ad campaigns is audience share. Audience share, also known as audience saturation (or Facebook audience share), is a metric informing how effective you were when it comes to reaching your ideal audience in the Meta ecosystem.
Audience share is calculated by dividing the ad set reach by Facebook’s estimated reach and converting the outcome into percentages. The higher the number is, the better.
100% audience saturation would mean that the ad set reached the whole target audience estimated by Facebook.
How to measure audience share?
Of course, you can count each ad set’s audience share manually, or, you can simply go to Sotrender’s section called Analyze Ads to check your results with no effort.
Audience share metric in Sotrender
Monitor the audience share metric >>>
Side note
Sotrender’s recent research shows, though, that the audience saturation metric, for the majority of campaigns, is very low. In Q1 2022, over 80% of ad sets were reaching less than 5% of the set target audience.
Sentiment
Is high user engagement always a reason to pop the champagne? Not exactly.
Even though users can leave many comments under your posts, you should be carefully looking at what those comments are about. In the social media era, not much is needed to trigger a crisis.
Marketers tend to forget especially about the ad comments (as if users couldn’t leave comments under ads). They are not really responding or reacting to them, so how can they even know whether those comments are positive or negative? Is an ad not doing more harm than good?
How to monitor sentiment?
In Facebook’s built-in solutions (Business Manager and Ads Manager) it’s not only hard to track ad comments but it’s also impossible to monitor each ad’s sentiment.
Again, if you decide to try Sotrender, sentiment monitoring becomes pretty simple.
All you have to do is to head over to the Analyze Ads tab again. Then choose for which ads (not campaigns nor ad sets) you’d like to monitor the sentiment.
And that’s it! You’ll automatically see the sentiment for every ad you’ve chosen.
As you can see, sentiment can be positive, negative, or neutral.
Which Facebook metrics should you be tracking?
The metrics we have gathered here are the ones that marketers are analyzing and paying attention to the most often. However, which ones you’ll be monitoring should be your informed decision. After all, what Facebook metrics you choose should correspond with both types of campaigns you’re running, as well as your marketing goals. For some companies, Facebook KPIs will be mostly related to reach and engagement, but for others, those could be related to conversions or sales.
Torrey Tayenaka
Marta Bongilaj
