Facebook Analytics: How can marketers replace it?


June 30, 2021

Many businesses rely on native social media analytics tools. For instance, the Facebook analytics tool can be easily accessed via browser or mobile app and is used to show all the data connected with aggregated demographics, like age and gender, but also shows the information on how different groups of people interact with the website, what are the audience preferences, or events across multiple channels.

Without any data or marketing analytics that definitely help you fuel your strategy, you will be going in blind, which usually never works out for anyone, unless you get lucky. Relying on your luck is never the best option for your social media marketing, so you definitely should consider relying on analytics tools. There are many that can provide you with all the relevant data to improve your social media performance. If you are wondering what kind of data is available, you can find a lot of useful stuff like information on social media, from social media accounts’ performance metrics to audience insights. 

Basically, every business, especially the small ones, is already taking advantage of this “Facebook for e-commerce” feature, and what is more interesting, they seem to be dependent on all the free data it extracts and make it usable in every sense. 

What is big news is that, as of today, Facebook has shut down its Facebook Analytics tool (which was a free tool from Facebook). This sounds kinda scary for so many users and it is for a reason. 

 

What can be done to stay ahead when Facebook analytics is gone?

 

Worry not. There are still options for using Analytics on Facebook because it is basically the end of just this specific tool. Moreover, there are plenty of other ways to monitor your analytics and engagement metrics on Facebook. Also, they are retiring Facebook Analytics as part of an initiative to consolidate business tools. 

The alternative tools to keep up your Facebook Analytics are numerous, as long as you know where to look for and how to make a sense of it all. Here are some alternative options that you can use: 

  1. Facebook Business Suite - It is a new tool being rolled out by Facebook for 2021 that enables you to manage your Facebook and Instagram business accounts by showing detailed insights about your audience, content, and trends. It is being considered as a fresh and all-in-one application for tracking, managing, and optimizing your social media Facebook strategy. The good thing is that it is available as a mobile app and on a desktop for most of its users. It is still not available for everyone, but it is definitely worth being checked out. 
     
  2. Ads Reporting and Ads Manager - These two tools are considered very similar to each other and offer help with measuring the effectiveness of ad campaigns on Facebook across multiple metrics. Additionally, they view the results of Facebook campaigns, ad sets, and ads. If you try to understand the difference between them, you will be able to use them in the best way. 
     
  3. Events Manager - It is a crucial tool for connecting your website with your Facebook account, and it’s where you set up and manage Facebook Business Tools, from custom Ad events to the all-important website pixel. It shows both attributed and unattributed events from Facebook pixels, mobile app SDKs, offline event sets, and Conversions APIs. This includes organic traffic, events attributed to your Facebook ads, and traffic driven from other platforms, excluding deduplicated events. The interesting thing is that Events Manager reports events even if they’re not from a Facebook user, and may report events from one person performing the same action multiple times.

 

Social Media Analytics Software

 

You can’t run away from options when you use Facebook. Social Media Analytics software can give you a lot of answers. It provides functionality for gathering and reporting on data related to social media accounts. Social media, marketing, and communications teams use social media analytics products when they need tools to identify successful practices, target demographics, and analyze real-time consumer practices. The result is finding out about customer desires and responsiveness and growing the businesses by measuring the effectiveness of social media campaigns. There is no doubt that all of this helps the users to create more effective campaigns while improving customer satisfaction and brand awareness. 

Which of these tools are free and how can we find the best ones? Below, we will mention some of the most famous social media marketing tools.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a very practical tool because it is an all-in-one social management solution that can really empower its users. Businesses that use this software can definitely do more with their social media strategy because they can better connect with audiences, streamline publishing workflows and make collaborations in real-time. What’s most important-they can turn social data into meaningful insights at scale. 

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a widely used tool among businesses, no matter their size. It has over 200,000 paid accounts and millions of users that take advantage of the possibility to build their brands, strengthen connections with customers and drive exceptional business results through only one software solution. Hootsuite allows you to confidently schedule posts across multiple social networks (including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube ). Additionally, it gives you the option to manage organic and paid social content together, easily keep track of customer conversations, break down silos in how you collaborate with your organization, and gain actionable real-time insights from social media to make critical business decisions—all from one intuitive dashboard. It is, without doubt, the world’s most widely trusted social media solution because it can set you up for success with expert certifications, training, and coaching in social marketing, social listening, and customer care, but also pushing your results further and getting the most from social media.

Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a complete social media management platform for businesses & agencies. It can help you in scheduling your posts, monitoring mentions, creating custom dashboards, which are some of the many options you have for your social media marketing strategy. It has 40+ products that are trusted by over 40 Million users. The set of features that it includes are the Publishing Calendar, Bulk Scheduler, and Repeat Post which will empower you with all the publishing tools that your business needs. Regarding analytics, it can offer so many monitoring capabilities which help you in tracking social conversations relevant for the business but also to respond to what matters. The advanced reporting features provide you with easy ways of analyzing performances through intuitive graphs and unlimited custom reports for their users. For those who need good team management,  Zoho Social’s collaboration features and custom user roles enable members to be brought on board to manage social accounts for multiple brands.

Semrush

Semrush is an online visibility management software-as-a-service platform and it is a leader in its category. It has over 50 products, tools, and add-ons across online visibility management. Some of the tools that encompass are tools for search, content, social media and market research, data for more than 140 countries, seamless integration with Google, and task management platforms. For all those companies who are serious about their online presence, Semrush can be a very important solution for important social media activities. 

Agorapulse

Agorapulse helps you stay organized, saves your time, and easily manages our social media with its inbox, publishing, reporting, monitoring, and team collaboration tools. Its features currently support Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube, and most of them are widely used for managing incoming social media messages, comments, and reviews from one place, planning and scheduling content, insightful analytics delivered in beautiful and actionable PDF and CSV reports that reveal what’s working — and what isn’t, discovering of trends and insights about your brand -- and your competitors, etc. Agorapulse also offers five free tools for social media managers: Easy Advocacy, Facebook Ads Report, Facebook Barometer, Twitter Report Card, and Facebook Timeline Contest.

Falcon.io

Falcon.io is a platform for social media monitoring, engaging, publishing, analytics, and managing customer data. Brands usually take advantage of having the chance to explore the full potential of digital marketing and advertising by managing multiple customer touchpoints on one platform. Marketers can deliver more personalized brand experiences based on enriched customer profiles. When it comes to measuring results, the platform features a highly intuitive and collaborative UI that gives the most relevant data. 

Sprinklr Modern Engagement

Sprinklr (@Sprinklr) is the world’s first Unified Front Office for Modern Channels that helps the brands in executing marketing, advertising, researching, caring, and engaging initiatives across all modern channels. It has an AI-based platform with a unified codebase that is deployed as a single global instance for each customer in order to drive collaboration and reduce silos across the organization. 

Later

It is an Instagram marketing platform that can help you visually plan, schedule, and analyze posts for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. The benefits that it brings are a lot and some of them include: saving time, growing your following, and driving engagement with features designed to help businesses succeed, especially the small ones.

 

Final thoughts

 

Even though the Facebook analytics tool is going away, Facebook and social media experts continue to invest in measurement products that provide insights and data analysis capabilities. This does not affect the Insights sections of Facebook Pages and Instagram Profiles. We can not consider it a huge change, although it can be a vision of more changes ahead. Plus Facebook still offers plenty of native tools to help the businesses keep an eye on their metrics, the engagement, and the progress on their suite of apps. 

Fortunately, we can help in getting a better understanding of what this all means and showing what you can do to stay on top. We would love to hear from you.

 


Let’s work together!

Author: Milena Kostadinova

Milena Kostadinova

Milena is an experienced content writer. She enjoys reading and constantly learning new things. She is addicted to watching movies and TV shows, but one of her main daily routines is exercising.