Facebook Insights 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Analyzing Facebook Performance

This article will tell you everything you need to know to get valuable Facebook insights.

You already know your Facebook insights are crucial for nudging your Facebook marketing strategy in the right direction. Facebook analytics give you the performance numbers you need to:

Optimize your ad spend
Improve the reach of your organic posts
Give statistics you can report to stakeholders
…And more

But Facebook bid adios to its native Facebook analytics tool (and the Facebook audience insights tool) in 2021. How do you get your Facebook analytics now? This article will tell you everything you need to know to measure your Facebook performance and get valuable insights.

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Note: You need to have a Facebook Business Page for your small business or a Facebook profile in professional mode to access Facebook analytics and insights. Personal Facebook accounts don’t serve the marketing function and thus have little to no insights data available.

What’s the difference between Facebook analytics and Facebook insights?

First things first: What’s the difference between Facebook analytics and Facebook insights?

Facebook analytics refer to the raw numbers, data, and performance statistics
Facebook insights refer to the learnings you derive from the above analytics

For example, let’s say you collate all your best-performing Facebook posts by finding all the content with the most engagement and reach. Here, you’re using Facebook analytics (likes, comments, shares, impressions, etc.) to determine which posts qualify as ‘best-performing’. After this collection, suppose you spot a pattern where most top performing posts were user-generated content. This is a Facebook insight you derived from your analytics.

Facebook offers raw analytics and some insights via its native tools. But you can also use third-party social media analysis tools to take a deeper dive into your performance metrics.

How to derive Facebook insights from 4 native Meta tools

Meta sunsetted its Facebook analytics tool to consolidate data from its other networks (like Instagram) all in one place. Now, you can view your Facebook Page performance in four ways inside Meta:

1. Professional dashboard

2. Meta business suite (only for Facebook Pages)

3. Meta ads manager (only if you run Facebook ads)

4. Facebook group insights (if you have a Facebook group)

1: Professional dashboard

The Professional dashboard is available for creators with professional mode on their Facebook profiles turned on and for Facebook Page insights. It contains simple surface-level Facebook analytics. If you’re looking for some quick insight into how your Facebook marketing is going, this is the best place to look at.

Inside the “Professional dashboard,” you’ll find an “Insight” tab containing four tabs:

1. Home: This section is a basic performance overview of your Page or profile for the past 28 days. You can see key metrics like overall page posts, total reach, page views, engagement, new followers, new page likes, recent content, and some basic info about your audience.

2. Your Page/Profile: Insights under this tab contain post reach, engagement, new followers, unfollows, and total interactions (likes, comments, shares, views, clicks) for the past 28 days.

3. Content: This page contains the public posts you’ve shared in the past 90 days (or you can filter for the past 7, 28, or 60 days) and how they’re performing individually.

4. Audience: Here, you can see fundamental demographic data (gender, age, and location) about the audience interacting with your Facebook Page or profile.

The professional dashboard is excellent if you simply want to do a quick flip-through of your Facebook posts’ performance. It’s not the most in-depth source of information, but it can get the ball rolling and is handy when you’re short on time.

It’s best to visit the professional dashboard regularly to stay in the loop on how your posts are performing and what audience demographics are interacting with your Page/profile.

2: Meta business suite

Meta business suite replaced Facebook analytics to become the source of native Facebook page insights. Facebook profiles with professional mode turned on don’t work inside Meta business suite at the time of writing this article.

The Meta business suite helps with many things (like unifying your inbox, scheduling content on Facebook and Instagram, etc.) including extracting in-depth Facebook analytics and insights into your organic and paid content on the platform.

As soon as you log in to your Meta business suite, you’ll find an “Insights” section on the left menu. Within insights, eight tabs contain extensive and in-depth info on your Facebook performance:

1. Overview: This subsection contains the basic info on your F