What are Facebook Analytics?
When thinking of media within a business context, a client is likely to have either Awareness or Direct Response objectives. In this post we'll look at Direct Response (D.R.) specifically, which entails sending people to destination websites where they embark on their onsite consumer journey.
Within D.R. an onsite consumer journey usually starts with browsing through websites or a shop catalogue, and ends with the confirmation of a website purchase. With Facebook delivering about 20% of referral traffic to websites, there is an attractive opportunity to optimise the onsite consumer journey by leveraging data of the Facebook Analytics suite, which essentially is a set of tools that aggregates data on how people behave on a website.
All big media owners in paid social meanwhile offer a 'Pixel' but one can yield the most insights from the Facebook Pixel. At iProspect, we help our clients by advising on the Pixel and making sense of the insights generated to inform future optimisations.
How should you use Facebook Analytics?
Brands should follow three simple steps to get actionable insights on their prospects and customers:
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Segmentation: As Facebook has a lot of data points on people (age, gender, location, job) and affinity related information (likes), it is worth understanding if there are patterns of connected data points. These patterns can be used to segment people into distinct audiences by using custom conversion points, which finally can be used as custom audiences for advertising.
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Defining a purchase funnel: This means using funnel steps such as Page Views, Add to Cart or Purchases and defining a maximum amount of time of a person to complete the funnel (i.e. an hour or a day). Funnels can be setup from a simple three-step process to a very detailed 15-step process. Keep in mind: the more granular, the richer the insight.
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Monitor and optimise: After a funnel has been created, it's time to collect data to understand what purchase metrics and retention looks like and at what stages of the funnel there is opportunity to optimise. An opportunity is to deploy Test & Learn scenarios where small tweaks get rolled out and tested, i.e. different angles on product photos, varying font sizes or streamlining conversion goals. Whenever a test is deployed, look at how it impacts the consumer journey and the conversion rate.
Summary
Clicking through to a brand website is a powerful signal of intent and by using Facebook Analytics, it is possible to harvest deep insights about the clicking audiences identified through the Facebook Pixel and segment them. By running tests tied to consumer journey optimisation, marketers can ultimately improve higher throughput in realised conversions.
