Facebook Insights Metrics Definitions In Plain English

Facebook Insights is a tool that Facebook provides for you to view the performance of your Facebook Fan Page. A lot of the features that are provided via Facebook Insights have similarities to other more traditional analytics tools, such as Google Analytics. However, much of the termi-nology that’s used is different.

Facebook Insights can help you to determine the type of content that resonates best with your au-dience, the optimal time to post your content, the best day in the week to post, and much more. The data provided by Insights will be continually updated to reflect your page’s performance and patterns that you may notice. Therefore, you will have to check it regularly to stay abreast with what’s happening on your fan page.

To ensure that you aren’t confused by the data within Facebook Insights, we are providing the following definitions to clarify terms. You can utilize the data displayed in these metrics in order to optimize the content you post in order to meet the expectations of your audience.

Check-Ins

Check-ins are helpful for businesses with a physical location. Fans can check-in when they arrive at your physical store or business to demonstrate their loyalty to you.

Within the check-in section of Facebook Insights you will be able to view the number of clients who have taken the time to check-in, and their demographic profile, such as where they reside, age, gender, and more.
Check-in information can be quite useful for businesses with a brick-and-mortar presence. It can help them to monitor the impact social media is having on their sales, and to track the days in which their business is busiest.

Engaged Users

The “engaged users” metric goes a step further than your fan count to give you data on the number of people who are actively engaging with the content on your page. From the users you reach, this metric tells you which users interacted with your page or content.

The amount of engagement your content gets has an impact on your capacity to gain a larger audience reach. If users don’t engage with your content, it is unlikely they will continue viewing it. Users who engage with your page or content are the most valued segment of your audience, because they are the users that are sharing and consuming your content.

Consequently, the “engaged users” metric is valuable for determining the performance of your content and your audience’s quality.

Fans

A fan is a Facebook users who ‘likes” your Fan page. When a user “likes” your page they will have the ability to receive page updates via posted content, event invitations and status updates. Each fan will have a list of the pages they have liked on their profile page.

In 2010 ‘Fan’ was replaced with ‘Like’. Fans can ‘Like’ a page and this is displayed in their profile.

Mobile Check-In

Facebook Places allows people to make use of the GPS on their mobile devices to inform friends of their location. Facebook has an app that can be used on iPhone and Android devices. Users who want to inform their Facebook friends of their location will select a “check in” button in order to view a list of nearby places. They can then select the place that corresponds to their location. After a user has checked-in, a story will be created in the news feeds of their Facebook friends and also be displayed on the ‘recent activity’ section of their Page.

Page Impressions

This is the total number of views a Facebook Fan page receives within a given period of time. This can be tracked via your Insights dashboard. This will provide you with a range of stats regarding your page. Page impressions are segmented into several categories that include unique page views, page views, external referrers, and tab views.

• Page Views: The total number of page views for your Fan page.
• Unique Page Views: The number of unique viewers for your page. Only one page view is counted for each user during a viewing session.
• Total Tab Views: This metric will count toward page views but it won’t be counted as part of the unique page views metric. It will show the various tabs that were viewed in a time frame. Each tab will have its own count, displaying the number of times it was viewed in comparison to other tabs.
• External Referrers: This metric will show you where your Facebook page traffic comes from. You will be able to see the number of page impressions that arrive from Facebook itself and from external sources.

Page Impressions Viral

Viral page impressions will be the number of people who viewed one of your posts or your page from a story that was shared by one of your friends. This may include, posting on your timeline, commenting, liking, sharing your posts, answering one of your questions, mentioning your page, responding to an event, tagging one of your pages, or checking-in at your physical location.

Page Interactions

These will be visitors that like, share, or otherwise engage with any content you post on your Facebook fan page. This will also include people who have clicked on, commented on, tagged, mentioned, or checked-in.

Stories

Stories created about your Facebook Fan Page will include:

• Fan Page likes
• Shares, comments, and likes of your posts
• Event responses
• Page mentions
• Page tags
• Check-ins or recommendations

Storytellers

Facebook has defined storytellers as the number of users who have shared stories regarding your Fan Page. This may include likes, wall posts, commenting, sharing, responding to a question you have posted, signing up to an event, page mentions, tagging your page, or checking-in.

Storytellers are really just users who have interacted with your page. Storytellers is a reference to users who create “objects” or “stories” in their own news feed that could direct their own friends to your Fan Page.
This metric can be of importance since it represents all of the users who have interacted with your Fan Page.

Subscribers Gained

Facebook has a subscribe button which will allow people to subscribe to your public status updates even if they have not ‘liked’ your page. Subscribers can also be people who have subscribed to your interest list. You can specify who may subscribe to your interest list. You can make your list public or only permit your friends to subscribe to it.

This metric will permit you to see the number of subscribers you have gained within a given time frame.