This is the last post in an informal 3-part series covering what Mike Amer, a fellow analyst at Resource Interactive, and I have arrived at when it comes to understanding and using the latest release of Facebook Insights. In this post, I’ll cover what metrics we’re generally gravitating towards as effective ways to measure the performance of a Facebook page.

As many, many, many people pointed out before the latest update to Facebook Insights, Page Likes (or “fan count”), while easy to measure, is not a particularly meaningful metric. As John Lovett would say, it is simply a “counting metric.”

Below are the metrics I’m gravitating to these days as KPIs for a page:

• Reach and Impressions – pick one or the other, but, if one of your goals for Facebook is to gain exposure for your brand, these are much better measures of exposure than Page Likes. If you’re running Facebook media, you may want to use Organic Reach (or Impressions) to measure the exposure you’re generating through non-paid means while the ads or Sponsored Stories are running (this will undercount the overall exposure slightly, as some of your viral reach is from non-paid activity, but there simply is no way to really tease that out)
• Engaged Users – if one of your goals for Facebook is to foster dialogue with users, then engaged users is a good measure, because it is a measure of how many people took any actual action related to your page (regardless of whether it “generated a story”); again, if you’re running paid media, you may want to adjust this metric by subtracting out New Page Likes from Ads.
• Average Post Engagement Rate – this is a second potential KPI for the goal of fostering dialogue with users; you have to get this from the post-level data, but it is simply a matter of dividing the number of engaged users by the total reach of the post and then averaging this for all posts in the reporting period.  This metric does not need to be “adjusted” when paid media is running. It is also a metric for which a page owner really can take direct action to affect by analyzing the virality of the individual posts in the reporting period and developing hypotheses as to what made the posts with the highest/lowest engagement rates different from each other (type of post, time of day, day of week, content, etc.). Those  hypotheses can then be tested with subsequent posts to see if they are validated.
• People Talking About or Stories Generated – if you are aiming for your users to spread the word about your page through their social graph, then these are KPIs to consider. Keep in mind that a person who generates a story by liking your page is producing a much broader reaching “story” than a person who simply comments on a page post. And, as with Engaged Users, subtracting out New Page Likes from Ads when you’re running paid media will give you a better picture of the non-paid results from the page in the same time period (although there will still be some spillover impact that is not currently possible to eliminate).
• Average Post Virality – Facebook reports the “virality” of any single post as the number of people talking about the post divided by the reach of the post. It’s a good metric, if something of a misnomer, because “Virality” is really “potential virality but minimal real virality due to Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithms…unless the post is a Facebook Question.”

It’s pretty easy to engineer much more involved metrics by diving into the organic, viral, and paid breakouts…but then you wind up with metrics that are hard for the typical business user to understand.

That’s our take. What metrics are you finding most useful with the new Facebook Insights? What measures are you least able to get that you wish Facebook would add (for me, it’s the ability to break out “viral” metrics into “triggered by paid media” and “not triggered by paid media”)?

In my last post, I provided an update as to how to interpret the primary measures and dimensions (organic/paid/viral) that are available in the latest iteration of Facebook Insights. While digging into those dimensions, my fellow Resource Interactive analyst, Mike Amer, stumbled across some mild unpleasantries that don’t quite square with how Facebook talks about brand pages in their formal documentation.

On the one hand, Facebook would have us thinking that it’s all about virality. That’s one of the reasons they’ve made “Friends of Fans” such a prominent (if laughable) metric!

To recap, the viral reach of a page or a post is the number of unique people who were exposed to content as a result of another user generating a story (“talking about” the page or post – liking, sharing, commenting, etc.). This differs from organic reach, which is the number of unique people who visited the page or saw an item in their news feed or ticker as a direct result of the page posting the content.

Here are a couple of dirty little clarifications and secrets about virality, though:

• The most common type of viral reach is from someone liking your page – despite Facebook’s insinuations that getting people to like and comment on your page posts will tap into that ginormous “friends of fans” number…those user actions tend to go nowhere. When someone likes your page, though, that generates a story that has a meaningful viral reach (unfortunately, that is a one-time viral exposure — that same user may comment on 10 page posts over the next week and the viral reach generated from those actions will be virtually nil).
• A page’s virality is dramatically impacted by paid media – If a Facebook Ad for the page is run and a user is exposed to the ad, then that exposure counts as 1 person towards the page’s Paid Reach. If the person clicks the Like button, Facebook will record that as a Like Source of “ads” (why they don’t have that data field name capitalized bothers my OCD, FWIW). But, a good chunk of their friends are going to get an item in their ticker that the person liked the page. All of those friends being exposed get counted as viral reach and impressions.
• Oh…yeah…and Facebook Questions – Facebook Questions are the single type of Facebook page post that appear to drive meaningful viral reach (presumably, because the Ask friends action is more valued by Facebook than other actions such as standard likes, comments, and shares). Questions are good for that! Unfortunately, we’ve seen several cases over the last month across different pages where the Organic Reach of Facebook Questions was reported as dramatically lower than the typical reach for a status update on the page. It’s unclear whether those lower numbers reflect reality or whether they are simply a Facebook Insights glitch

All this is to say that viral reach is messy (…and don’t take what Facebook espouses at face value).

In my last post in this unofficial series, I’ll provide a list of the KPIs we’ve been gravitating towards with our clients and why.

When the latest Facebook Insights was released, I quickly put up a post that both tried to explain the new metrics that became available and proposed some probable KPIs.

Well, a few months have passed, Facebook has quietly rolled out some changes to Facebook Insights, and we’ve gotten a chance to actually dive into some of these metrics. This post and the next two are the result of some digging that Mike Amer and I have done on behalf of Resource Interactive and our clients.

Note: This is minimally a post about the web-based Facebook Insights interface. Rather, it is focused on the slightly deeper data that is available behind that interface, which is available by exporting page-level and post-level data or through the Facebook API.

Understanding the Basics – Reach, Talking About, Engaged Users, Consumers

I get a little depressed when I think about the number of times I have read and re-read the same one-line Facebook Insights definitions for various metrics, which have the illusion of being crystal clear on an initial reading, and then get increasingly confusing with each subsequent cycle of trying to actually interpret the data.

I continue to think that the best way to understand the main new metrics is via a Venn diagram. But, the page-level Venn diagram has evolved a bit since my initial post, as Facebook quietly added a page-level Engaged Users metric, which is the union of People Talking About and Consumers. I also think that Facebook changed the definition of Consumers to include clicks that generated a story, but I haven’t tracked down old printouts to fully confirm.

Below is an updated Venn diagram for page-level Facebook metrics.

And, below is an (unchanged) Venn diagram for post-level metrics:

What About Paid/Organic/Viral (especially Viral!)?

At both the page level and the post level, Facebook breaks down a number of metrics by “paid,” “organic,” and “viral” Here’s how I’ve been describing these when it comes to page-level reach:

• Organic – unique people who visited the page or saw an item published by the page in their news feed or ticker
• Viral – unique people who were exposed to content as a result of another user generating a story (“talking about” the page – liking the page, sharing a post, etc.)
• Paid – unique people who saw a Sponsored Story or Ad pointing to the page

A single user can be reached by multiple ways in a given time period (e.g., they saw a post from the page that they’re a fan of in their news feed – organic – and then saw that a friend of theirs responded to a question on the page in their ticker – viral – and then was exposed to a Facebook Ad – paid), so, when it comes to reach, the sum of organic reach plus viral reach plus paid reach is greater than the total reach. Reach measures are always de-duped to be a count of unique users.

When it comes to impressions, though, there is no de-duping, so the sum of the different types of impressions equals the total impressions.

In my next post, I’ll dig into “virality” a little deeper (it turns out to be a bit of a bugaboo metric, but it’s also one that turns out to reveal some sneaky little unpleasantries about Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm).