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How To Profile Your Perfect Customer For Free with Facebook Analytics
Are you leveraging the power of Facebook Analytics?
If you’re making money online: chances are you’re one of the 50 million people driving traffic with Facebook Ads.
If you are, you’ve probably installed a Facebook Pixel to track your results. But did you know that one of the best things about the Facebook pixel was only recently released?
You might not know it, but Facebook has its own analytics tool, recently updated to support websites (it used to be limited to mobile apps). Facebook Analytics can be configured to track events and create some pretty detailed reports. BUT that’s a bunch of work to do something other tools can do better.
Lucky for us, Facebook Analytics is completely free and surprisingly easy to use (not like the Facebook Ads editor that feels like Rocket Surgery sometimes).
As digital marketers, while we don’t need Facebook Analytics to understand user behavior, instead it’s the ideal tool for understanding who our customers are → so we can find more of them!
With 2 billion users online every month, Facebook knows more about you and your customers than the NSA, CIA, and FBI combined. And all this information is available to everyone who’s got a Facebook Pixel installed – no extra setup required.
Without any extra configuration or setup, we can access:
- Demographics [sample report]
- Income and spending habits (for certain countries) [sample report]
- and; page-like data (which is super powerful for Facebook Ad targeting) [sample report]
Facebook Analytics provides a huge range of data to help us understand our customers – all you have to do is access it.
What is Facebook Analytics?
Facebook Analytics is a free tool that helps businesses understand how people are using their desktop and mobile websites, apps or Bots for Messenger by analyzing demographic data and audience insights.
Facebook Analytics has a similar interface to Google Analytics and splits your data by tracking pixel. It comes with several sections/reports, and most of them will already be filled with data the first time you log in! You can even pull some of your Facebook data into Google Data Studio (learn more about Data Studio)
Facebook Analytics for audience insight
Facebook Analytics provides loads of actionable data aggregated from the actual Facebook profiles of your users. Unlike other tools, there’s no guessing here because Facebook can perfectly match your visitors to their user base. It’s a little “big brother” but we might as well take advantage of us!
One thing you’ll want to keep in mind is that you’ll need a minimum audience size for some reports, so you may need to choose a section higher up the funnel (such as looking at subscribers instead of buyers).
Some of the in-depth information Facebook gives us access to includes:
- Household income
- Purchasing patterns
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Language
- Education
- Relationship Status
- Pages they like on Facebook
- Technology used
- Family sizing
To get access to this wealth of data is to have the Facebook pixel installed and then visit //analytics.facebook.com and activate your account.
Facebook Analytics is automatically included with the Facebook tracking pixel, so you will be able to view web activity data in Facebook Analytics without making changes.
Other Facebook Analytics tools
Although Facebook Analytics offers the most detailed and accurate data for audience insights on Facebook, there are two other free analytics tools provided by the site to help businesses monitor metrics and analyze the performance of content.
Facebook Page Insights
Page Insights is Facebook’s free embedded analytics package for business pages that lets page admins track information about page performance and their audience. It’s available to any admin of the page once the page has over 30 likes through the ‘Insights’ tab at the top of the page.
Facebook Insights divides the analytics data into sections:
- Overview – a look at big picture trends on the page and a brief comparison with similar pages
- Likes – How many likes you’ve gained and sources of new likes
- Reach – How many people (both followers and non-followers) saw your posts, including as an organic post on a News Feed, as post a friend liked or commented on or a promoted post
- Page views – Who viewed your page and what section they saw. Using demographics information, this can help you determine if audience targeting is working
- Actions on page – What people did on your page
- Posts – How well posts are performing
- People – Who liked, commented, saw or engaged with your page (including demographics information)
- Messages – Messenger analytics and response times
- Others – This includes promotional or branded content
Facebook Audience Insights
Audience Insights is a super flexible way to analyze various audience types including:
- the entire Facebook audience
- people directly connected to your page
- ‘custom audience’ you’ve created from database imports and retargeting
You can access data not only about people who are interacting with your brand but also those who you want to be interacting with the brand.
The data comes mostly from self-reported data (via profiles and behavior) and ‘off-Facebook data’ bought en masse by Facebook from companies such as Epsilon, Acxiom, and Datalogix. Purchasing habits and household income tend are the primary uses of external data.
Audience Insights has five sections:
- Demographics – This includes age, job role, gender, education, lifestyle, relationship status, and household size
- Page likes – Shows the top pages people in your chosen group like in various categories
- Location and Language
- Facebook usage – How often people in your audience use Facebook and on what devices
- Purchase activity – Shows past purchase behavior in your chosen group and how they shop.
Facebook Audience Insights is also 100% free to everyone.
It seems that Facebook is going to continue to unlock the wealth of customer data they hold and lucky for us it seems they’ll be making it all free with the goal of us using that data to improve our Facebook Ads!
