When social media marketers ran Facebook campaigns that were aimed at driving traffic toward their websites, they had to resort to tools such as Google Analytics in order to measure success or failure of their Facebook campaigns. However, a nifty new addition to the Facebook arsenal is the 'insights for domains' feature which has been introduced with minimum fanfare by Facebook. I strongly believe that if you run Facebook campaigns for your website then this is a 'must have' tool in order to monitor and optimise your Facebook content consumption.
We tested it out on our website for a couple of months and the information we have been able to gather has not only been extremely insightful, but also helped make better decisions regarding social media marketing strategies and tactics when running Facebook campaigns. This is indeed a phenomenal development, and one that we thought should be elaborated.
Getting started
In order to set up insights for websites, you will need to associate your website with a Facebook page or app that you manage. Go to http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and click on the green button that reads "insights for your website".
This will generate a meta tag that will need to be placed within your <head> tags. You then need to provide access to a user, the admins of a page or the admins of an application.
Once set up is complete you can get on to the main 'insights for domains' interface, where you are presented with an overview of your site's engagement with users.
Here you are presented with the number of times Facebook users have posted a link to your site on their friend's 'wall', their 'status updates' or through a 'social plugin' on your website. This information helps gauge how effective your social media campaigns are. You are also provided with the number of impressions where you can note how many people viewed the particular post. Finally you are provided with the number of referral traffic sent to your site, arguably the most important metric among the three as it shows how effective the content actually is in gaining traffic to your site.
What is quite fascinating about Facebook insights for domains is that when you view statistics of a particular day, you can view activity by the hour! The picture below illustrates that most amount of activity occurred on Wednesday 3rd of August 2011 at 8am.
The 'like' button tree view on the left of your page lets you collapse the menu to see stats for your 'like' button. It provides figures of user behaviour for those users who viewed the like buttons on your website and the actions they took.
You also get the click through rate for the 'like' button and also the click through rates for the likes you receive on your stories you share on Facebook. You can also access information about the number of likes you gain based on demographics and geographical locations. Furthermore, you can view the most 'liked' content on your website.
The metric which is probably the most important in my opinion, is 'organic shares'. This provides information of the number of people who actually share your link on their wall or status. The more organic shares you get, the greater the likelihood of it going viral. As a social media marketer, the goal and challenge is to increase this number.
Having browsed through the plethora of information Facebook 'insights for domains' offer, what does all this mean for social media marketing? Well firstly, it solves a longstanding limitation of social media promotion as it now provides measurable and quantifiable numbers of traffic sent over to your website through Facebook and the 'method' or 'channel' it was sent through (organic shares, likes, sent directly to friends, through posted comments etc.). Also it is possible to monitor what content of your website is shared more often through Facebook and you could replicate similar content. Furthermore, you can target content specifically for the most receptive gender, age group and geographical locations which in itself should be enough information to fine tune your social media marketing strategies and tactics.
If you are a social media marketer, this tool not only helps with reporting and decision making, but is a thermometer for your Facebook marketing campaigns – helping you study the social media effectiveness and health of your campaigns.
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