While most websites use Google Analytics for their analytics, there remains one glaring hole in reporting: Facebook. Perhaps the idea of Google and Facebook being arch-enemies is a bit of an exaggeration, neither of them really wants to share their data with the other. None of this makes analysis particularly easy.

There are basic reports on Facebook activity available in your Google Analytics account – the Shared URLs, for example – but they don’t really cut it. If you want to find out what’s actually happening within Facebook’s four walls, you’ll need a different solution.

Facebook’s own analytics platform, Facebook Insights, only tells you what’s happening based on a handful of metrics. Marketers often find that drawing meaningful conclusions based on Reach and Talking About This to be particularly tricky, as they’re abstract metrics that are difficult to pin down to actual, concrete events.

This is why many marketing folk find the effectiveness of Facebook as a marketing channel incredibly hard to gauge. Luckily, there is a raft of third-party analytics tools to bridge some of the gaps left between Facebook and Google Analytics and better still, some of them are free.

Simply Measured offers a heap of analytics tools for various social platforms, but their free social media tools are well worth a look. One of my favourites is the Facebook Competitive Analysis Report which shows how different Pages fare in terms of engagement, fans and inbound enquiries.

Next up, Minilytics which is a free tool offered as a taster for PageLever, a more advanced set of Facebook analytics (which are fantastic, but not free.) Minilytics plugs into your Facebook account and gives you fast, comprehensive insights focused on answering questions: which posts perform best, which ones you should have promoted, and which audience segments are the most responsive. 

Of course, we’re still not truly bridging the gap between Facebook and Google, but it’s good to know that it’s possible to get a better handle on your metrics than the standard reporting platform allows.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Damion Brown is Principal Consultant at Data Runs Deep, a web analytics consulting firm based in Melbourne. He works with organisations to help them find the right mix of digital analytics platforms, then trains internal resources in how to work with and interpret the data. To find out more visit datarunsdeep.com.au.

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