6 Facebook Analytics Hacks For Digital Marketing Agencies

Facebook houses 3.4 billion users as we speak. Out of these 71% are Gen Z and 77% are millennials – generally our top choices for customers. This means no matter which business we cater to, our audience is present on Facebook.

Given this, it would be hard to perform targeted marketing with just basic analytics. What would be helpful though are learning some hacks and handy analytics tips to nail every marketing campaign on Facebook. 

We’re not one to gatekeep–so in this post, we’re sharing our favorite Facebook analytics hacks for digital marketing agencies so they measure and conquer the Facebook ecosystem. 

With such a huge audience, marketing without analytics would be like shooting a broken arrow in the dark. If you’re aiming for something specific, you will need to be guided with the right strategies and insight. 

Here are some that we have used that have proven to be effective:

1. Leveraging hidden Facebook insights features

While many marketers focus primarily on traditional feed posts, we like using other two lesser known features: the ‘Stories’ and ‘People’ tab. They keep us closely connected to my audience and give additional insights into their behavior. 

Not only do stories reach more people, they come with analytics to help you understand how users are watching and interacting with them. Stories include metrics such as:

• Reach and impressions: to understand how many users are viewing your Stories and how many times they’re seeing them.
• Engagement metrics: to track interactions such as taps forward, taps backward, exits, and replies to gauge user engagement.
• Completion rate: to measure how many users watch your entire ‘Story’ and check how interested people are in your content.

From here, you can head over to the ‘People’ tab to get detailed demographics of the audience that engages with your posts, ads or stories. This includes data on their age, gender, location, and more. It provides deeper insights into the people who’re engaging with your content. 

For example, if you’re handling the Facebook page of a fitness brand; through the “People” tab, you can see that their audience primarily consists of females aged 25-34 located in urban areas. 

This now allows you to create content and ads that specifically cater to this demographic, increasing the effectiveness of your campaigns. You can also tweak your copy to make it more appealing to women and make it more relatable to this specific demographic. 

You can use these insights to tailor your content and marketing strategies according to the specific preference of my audience.

2. Advanced audience insights mining

Facebook’s Audience Insight tool offers more than just follower count, likes and comments to reveal more insights about your audience. It provides information about two types of users – the current audience and potential audience – basically people who have similar interests as your audience. 

Gianluca Ferrugia at DesignRush, explains how using Facebook’s Audience Insights tool significantly enhances targeted marketing strategies for his company through in-depth data analysis. “By accessing comprehensive insights on both current and potential audiences—including demographics, interests, and behaviors—we can tailor DesignRush’s marketing efforts to better meet the specific needs and preferences of our audience segments. This helps increase engagement by delivering more relevant content and ads and  also optimizes resource allocation for higher ROI.”

For current audience, Facebook shares age, location, gender, engagement and interests. It also shares filters to find your ‘potential audience’. With these filters in place, it shows you an estimated audience size and tells you more about their interests and habits.

These filters include:

• Top pages – to see the most relevant pages liked by the selected audience, providing insights into their interests and preferences. These pages can be industry influencers for brands they trust. Partnering with them can increase your reach and credibility. 

• Top cities/countries –  to see where your audience is based so you can optimize targeting and localization efforts for specific regions.

• Psychographics: to dive deep into their psyche. Are they fitness enthusiasts who follow healthy recipe pages? Busy professionals interested in time-saving hacks? Understanding their motivations allows you to tailor content that speaks directly to their needs.

• Age and gender: to gauge their affordability and buying habits 

• Language preferences: to write copy or content 

These filters help you focus your strategies. It ensures that your campaigns reach the most relevant audience segments, maximizing engagement and conversion potential.

3. Behavioral triggers for dynamic content

If you notice, the ads you get served on your social media channel are different compared to say your friends or parents. This is because the content is dynamic. 

Dynamic content is basically personalized information that is sent to your audience based on their interest and preferences. 

Simon Bacher, CEO, Co-founder of ​​Ling explains: , “Here’s how it works: We observe tons of data to find what customers like and then we tailor our content based on their preferences. This means our content gets shown only to people who have already shown interest in learning a new language and it’s the reason why dynamic content works so well. Dynamic content is more interesting and relatable to this particular segment,  so more people tend to click on the posts and are more likely to convert.”

Dynamic content can be anything from Facebook posts, stories or ads. Social commerce is estimated to reach $1.2T by 2025, which means investing in dynamic content and including it in your digital marketing strategies will definitely pay off. 

Here’s how you can launch dynamic ads on Facebook:

• Product catalog: First, you have to create a product catalogue with essential details like names, images, prices, and unique identifiers that serves as the foundation for dynamic ads.

• Facebook Pixel and/or Facebook SDK: You have to install Facebook Pixel orSDK monitor on your website to track user actions such as page views, cart additions, and purchases. 

• Facebook ads manager account: A dynamic ads account is a prerequisite for leveraging dynamic ads. 

• Audience segmentation strategy: Then, you can now define specific audience segments based on user behaviors such as page visits, cart interactions, and previous purchases. 

• Creative assets and templates: Now that the backend work is done,you can collect your assets like ad templates, compelling copy, and eye-catching visuals to my dynamic ads to make them more relevant to my target audience.

4. Cross-platform analysis for holistic strategy

While Facebook is an important platform where you can gain valuable insights, it’s very  likely that you’re handling several different ones–which means you can conduct cross-platform analysis. 

With the right social media tool, you can easily track accounts and hashtags across your major social media platforms. For example, our main platforms are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and with Keyhole, we can gain a comprehensive understanding of my audience’s behavior and preferences across various channels and look into demographic data, interests, and engagement metrics to identify patterns and trends. This allows  me to craft consistent messaging and branding across multiple platforms. 

For instance, for Kris Lippi, Founder of isoldmyhouse.com, whose business is rooted in real estate  ecommerce, it’s important to drill down to very specific demographics and psychographics to ensure his ads are effective. “I find relevant audience data across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and use that to tailor content and campaigns that will resonate with specific audience segments across different geographic territories. This helps enhance our ads with more targeted details that attract and engage our target audience.” 

If you want to go a step further than demographics, you can use Facebook Pixel integration to track various events such as website visits, product views, and purchases across all channels. 

To further enhance cross-platform analysis on Facebook, you can leverage features such as Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences. 

By creating Custom Audiences based on website visitors or engagement with specific content,  you can target users with relevant ads on both Facebook and other platforms. Similarly, Lookalike Audiences allow you to expand my reach by targeting users who share similar characteristics with my existing audience.

Another way you can keep an eye on multiple platforms at once is through Keyhole. It lets you post on multiple platforms at once and track each of their analytics in one dashboard. Keyhole’s calendar provides a holistic visual of all scheduled posts in one place so I don’t have to jump from platform to platform. 

5. Utilizing geo-location data for localized campaigns

Average facebook ads ranges from $0.30-$3.89 – quite a spread.

According to Marketing Director of Green Building Elements,  Sarah Jameson, it’s not unusual to pay $1.18 on average CPC in their sector. “This is  why I’m very conscious about how to run my campaigns in a way that  brings me my money’s worth and geolocation data helps me with that.” 

Geolocation data helps give you more specific details—locations, zip codes, offers, and local languages—that make ads more personalized. Once data is set up, you can easily create localized campaigns, relevant to your target audience.

And let’s not forget about weather intelligence. Combining location and weather data opens up a world of possibilities for hyper-targeted advertising.

In a very simplistic application of these features–imagine it’s raining in one city but sunny in another. With insight into weather, I can tailor my ads to sell umbrellas in the rainy city and sun hats in the sunny one. It’s all about delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

6. Sentiment analysis for content optimization

A major part of marketing any business is understanding what people think about the brand; how they perceive the product. Today,, what people share about a brand on social media can make or break the brand. 

In fact, according to Bain and Company, usage tools that can sense your customers’ feelings have the strongest correlation with a company’s revenue growth. That’s why I take sentiment analysis very seriously. 

There are 4 steps to track and use your customers’ sentiments in your favor:

• Monitor brand mentions and comments 
• Understand the sentiment behind those mentions 
• Track social sentiment scores
• Optimize content based on these data

Keyhole helps me track audience sentiment and keep tabs on my brand reputation. Keyhole uses  machine-learning-driven brand monitoring to find out if:

• Your brand is suddenly gaining exponential traction
• Unhappy customers are complaining on social media 
• Influential people talking about your brand

It catches relevant insights as they happen and instantly captures brand mentions. It also tracks your profile to show you what strategies worked and what needs improvement.

Best practices and ethical considerations

Facebook analytics are meant for targeted marketing but that doesn’t mean that they’re free to be used without considering best practices and ethical consideration. 

Here are some ethical considerations to keep in mind:

• Understand data sharing terms: You should thoroughly understand the terms and conditions outlined in Meta Business Tools. It will help you comply with data sharing regulations and protect your clients’ data privacy.

• Configure tools and data sharing: Digital marketing agencies can tailor Meta Business Tools to share specific data sets, such as customer demographics or purchasing behavior, to optimize ad targeting strategies.

• Adhere to business tools terms: It’s important to adhere to Business Tools Terms.  That’s how you maintain the integrity of your advertising campaigns while respecting user privacy and data protection regulations.

• Be aware of additional terms: It’s important to be aware of supplementary terms and policies, such as advertising standards and platform-specific regulations. It ensures that your campaigns align with platform guidelines and legal requirements.

• Ensure responsible data handling: Collecting data is necessary but you should implement robust data management practices such data inventorying and compliance auditing. It safeguards clients’ information and mitigates potential risks of data misuse.

• Educate customers about data usage: Most customers and clients already know that you use their data for marketing purposes. So, it’s better to educate them about how you are actually utilizing it. Transparency in data practice will build trust in client-agency relationships.

Unlock better insights with advanced analytics 

Done well, these hacks can transform your digital marketing strategies. The goal is to find the right people, understand their behavior and preferences, and cater your content to that.

But collecting all this data manually and analyzing it on a spreadsheet every day can be tedious and time consuming–and that’s where the right technology comes in. 

Finding the right platform to serve as your central dashboard for all social media analytics and lets you analyze multiple profiles, brand mentions and campaign performance can be a game changer.

Keyhole can serve as your central platform for all your social media analytics requirements to effectively streamline your digital marketing efforts.. 

Author bio

Gianluca Ferruggia is a seasoned digital marketer with over eight years of experience in the field. His career started with SEO and PPC until he branched out to other facets of digital marketing, sales, and business development. He is currently the General Manager at DesignRush, where he leads a team of 100+ professionals, oversees business operations, and develops strategies to achieve business goals. In 2 years, he grew the company’s agency network to over 30,000, making it one of the leading B2B marketplaces connecting businesses with agencies.

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