How to create Facebook Insights reports in Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio is a great tool for visualizing Facebook data. It has everything you need for clearly presenting your data: you can illustrate key metrics with scorecards, build trend lines of changes in, map out followers’ location, and pull content and engagements into a single table.

This article is your go-to guide for a successfully analyzing and reporting on the performance of your Facebook page in Data Studio. But if you just need a connector and already know what you’re doing, feel free to start your free 14-day trial of Supermetrics for Data Studio.

You’ll get valuable insights on what different Facebook key metrics there are to track and what those metrics mean (yes, it can get tricky..!). Next, you will learn more about Supermetrics Facebook Insights connector, how to use it, and why it is a great tool for Data Studio reporting.

After that you will see how you can organize metrics into a nice meaningful marketing report using Supermetrics connector. And lastly, you will get 3 free and easy-to-use Facebook Insights Data Studio reporting templates. Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it?

To make navigation easier, here is the contents of this post. Just click on the section you want to learn more about to jump to that section:

• What are the key Facebook metrics to track and what do they mean?
• Getting started with Supermetrics Facebook Insights connector
• Creating a 3-page Facebook Insights overview report
• Facebook Page Insights reporting templates
• Conclusion

Alright, let’s get started!

What are the key Facebook metrics to track and what do they mean?

Facebook Insights has multiple metrics, which help assess how your page is performing. The main point to understand and remember is that almost all the metrics can be subdivided into page-level and post-level metrics. So, when reporting, you must choose the relevant page- or post-dimension, depending on what data you would like to see.

It might sound a bit complicated at first, but don’t worry, you will find all the explanations and examples further in this article. Below I will list the main categories of metrics to pay attention to and tell more about what they mean.

Impressions and reach

Let’s start with the “basics”. It is crucial to understand what exactly Facebook identifies as page reach and impressions. Apart from that, it is good to know what all 4 types of those metrics mean in practice.

Impressions is the number of times your page or your posts were seen. You can have page impressions (marked as “total impressions” when reported with Supermetrics Facebook Insights connector) and post impressions (named “total impressions of posts”).

Note, that another sister metric, referred to and reported as “post impressions” reflects the number of times the post was shown to page followers only.

Reach indicates the number of people who have seen the post. The difference from impressions is that instead of the number of times, the number of people is counted, which is why in some cases reach is called “unique impressions”. In case one person has seen the post twice, this post will get 1 person reached and 2 impressions.

Just like with impressions, there are “page reach” and “post reach” metrics (reported as “total reach” and “total reach of posts” respectively).

The “post reach” metric works just like “post impressions”: it reports the number of people from the page’s fanbase, who have seen a particular post.

There are 3 types of impressions and reach: organic, paid and viral.

Organic impressions reflect the number of times your content was shown from your page directly. Paid impressions show the number of times your content was shown as a paid Facebook ad and finally, viral impressions indicate the number of times your content was seen as a story, published by a Facebook user.

In case someone comments something on your page, the content views of this person’s friends will be counted as viral impressions.

In a similar way, there are organic, paid and viral types of reach, which work just like impressions, only instead of the times shown, it’s about unique number of people who have seen your piece of content. There are also total impressions and reach, (a sum of all the impressions and people reached). You can learn more about the “total” reach from this article by Jon Loomer.

Page and post engagement

Engagement indicates how many times someone took action on either a page- or post-level. These actions can be either positive or negative. Let’s dive into a bit of a detail here.

Post-level positive feedback (actions) include:

• Reactions on post
• Comments
• Shares
• Saving a link to the post

NB! All reactions on post are reported as part of the “positive feedback” metric, even if some of them are not of a positive nature per se (e.g. reactions such as “angry” or “sad”).

Post-level negative feedback (actions) include:

• Hiding the post
• Reporting the post as spam
• Unfollowing the page

Interesting good-to-know: “unfollowing the page” is a part of a post-level negative feedback, not page-level negative feedback. This is so due to the fact that users can unfollow the page by selecting the relevant option in each of the post’s drop-down menu.

Page-level positive feedback (actions) include:

• Like a story
• Comment on a story
• Sharing a story
• Answer a question
• Claim an offer
• Respond to an event proposal

Page-level negative feedback (actions) include:

• Hiding a story
• Hiding all posts from the page
• Reporting some of page’s content as spam
• Unliking a page

When reporting post-level positive feedback, it is crucial to understand what “post reactions” metric actually represents. As you can see from the image below, there are reactions which happen on the original post itself and on post shares (in this example they include only “like” and “love”).

When you split “post reactions” by e.g. post name while reporting, you will not see solely post reactions, but the total number of reactions (in the given example this number will be 44: 2 “love” reactions on post + 40 likes on post + 2 likes on post shares).

Page likes, follows and demographics

Now let’s talk about some of the most important page metrics. Page likes and follows are good to keep in mind as they directly affect the reach (the number of people who sees your post).

By default, every Facebook user who likes your page, automatically starts to follow it too. In practice it means that users are opted in to start seeing your content on their timeline. If some users choose to unfollow the page while still liking it, they will still show up as the page’s audience, but will not see your posts.

Page demographics options include gender, age, language, country and city. When reporting, page likes and other key metrics can be broken down by the mentioned dimensions.

Reporting video statistics

With the video content rocketing in popularity and being used on social media more often, Facebook started to offer multiple metrics needed for video marketing reporting. For instance, you can check video views, which can be subcategorized as:

• Total
• Unique
• Clicked to play
• Organic X sec. watched
• Paid X sec. watched
• Auto-played X sec.watched

You can also see whether you want to view those metrics for the whole playtime, 10 seconds or 30 seconds’ playtime.

Now we have covered various key metrics you can track. However as a marketer you not only need to track those metrics, but also to organize them into a meaningful report in order to get valuable insights. And if you want to learn how to do it in Google Data Studio with ease, just continue reading down the blogpost!

Getting started with Supermetrics Facebook Insights connector

Now that you are ready to jumpstart your Facebook page reporting I will introduce Supermetrics Facebook Insights connector as a good tool for that.

In case you already have this Supermetrics connector set-up, you can skip this guide, however if you need a step by step instruction, just follow a great tutorial by Resourceful Business.

Supermetrics connector offers a very comprehensive reporting of the stats: you can fetch almost 200 dimensions and metrics. Here are some of the greatest superpowers of this hero-connector:

Superpower #1: You can easily report both post- and page- level metrics.

Those metrics will provide you with great overview on how your page and posts are performing. You can see what actions towards your page the audience has taken after seeing your posts. The metrics just have to be broken down by either page- or post- dimension.

Superpower #2: You can report both paid and organic metrics.

In case you want to track how your promoted posts are doing use Facebook Insights connector. Among common metrics such as “paid reach” and “paid impressions” you will find promoted video metrics.

Superpower #3: You can split metrics by various dimensions to get greater insights.

As it was mentioned earlier in the blogpost, you can split post reactions by post type or post name, for example.

Superpower #4: Supermetrics Facebook Insights Connector works flawlessly with Supermetrics reporting templates created in Data Studio.

Follow till the end of the article to get 3 different, free and easy-to-use Facebook Insights templates.

Creating a 3-page Facebook Insights overview report

As it was already mentioned in this blogpost Google Data Studio offers great visualization options for every type of marketing data. You can easily picture the progress with a timeline, highlight the most important metrics with scorecards and show geographical location of your followers on the map.

In this part of the article you learn how you can organize your Facebook metrics in a 3-page report to get useful insights.

It all starts with a question

First of all, you should think about an audience of your report, in other words, for whom this report is intended. Next, come up with a set of questions this audience needs to find answers to. This will help you get started easily and by creating a set of questions you will make sure your report is meaningful for your audience.

My example report below is intended for the marketing team’s internal use, and I thought that they would be interested to have a deep enough but not too detailed insight into the page’s data.

Below is a summary of questions my 3-page report aims to answer. Questions here are organized by topic:

Page 1: General overview

1. How does Facebook Page marketing funnel look like? How good are the conversion rates at every step of the funnel?
2. What form of reach performed better over time: viral, organic, or paid? What is the total reach?
3. How much organic traffic comes to my website from the Facebook page?

Page 2: Page analysis

1. Which country do page likes (fans) come from?
2. What is the most common age group of page fans/followers?
3. What is the most common gender of page fans/followers?
4. What actions do people take on the page?

Page 3: Posts analysis

1. What is the most engaging content type?
2. What is the most popular post action type (like, comment, share)?
3. What is the most engaging post?
4. How do people react to each of the posts?

Now that the questions are written and organised, let’s walk through this report page by page and see how answers to those questions can be visualized with data.

General overview

First, let’s create a page, which allows to take a look at the key metrics inside Facebook Insights. With the help of the scorecards I have outlined the funnel where I will put metrics, such as Impressions, Content Clicks, Page likes and Net likes according to their position in the funnel. Then, I calculated the conversion rates at each step of the funnel.

Ratios are a great way to measure your conversion efforts at each stage. The first one, “content clicks to total Impressions” tells how many clicks happened on your page after the page was shown.

The second ratio, “likes to content clicks” reflects how many people liked your page after interacting with your content.

The last ratio, “net likes to likes” indicates how many people remained liking your page. In this example, a bit over a half of people who liked the page originally, remained liking the page, as seen on the picture above. “Net likes” is a metric, which is calculated by subtracting the number of dislikes from the number of likes. In case net likes returns a negative value, it means that there were more dislikes than likes. You can learn about more ratios you could try out from this post by Jon Loomer.

All ratios were created as calculated metrics, and if you do not know how to create those, check out this post on Supermetrics blog.

Next, I will outline 4 types of reach – total, paid, organic, and viral – on a sparkline chart, so that their dynamics can be easily compared with each other.

In the bottom of the page there is a table showing Reach statistics for all campaigns.

Page analytics

This page will focus on the Facebook page’s audience: there is a geo map to visualize where the followers (page likes) are coming from, breakdown of likes by age and gender as well as positive and negative actions people make.

Post analytics

The last page focuses on posts’ analytics more in-depth: you can see the most engaging post type and most popular action (are people commenting, liking or sharing content the most?).

Additionally, there is a Posts Feedback table at the bottom of the page where you can see engagement metrics broken down by posts so you can track how individual piece of content is performing compared to the others.

Post reactions table allows to see all the reactions for a number of posts or for one post. Let’s take a bit closer look at this table, created with the help of scorecards and a filter drop-down menu. If you want to recreate a table like this in your own report, follow a small step-by-step guide below.

The tricky thing is, that in case you simply create the scorecards, you will run into an error of data not being shown (like in the table on the left):

To set up this table correctly, you need to:

1. Create a scorecard for each of the reactions. Do not mind the “System error” text
2. Create a “Post name” filter
3. Group the scorecards and the created filter together
4. Select one or several posts from the filter’s drop-down menu. The key point here is not to select all the posts, otherwise the metrics in the scorecards would not work.

Good to know: some metrics can only be “activated” when split by the right dimensions with the help of a drop-down menu filter. So, in case you see the same error message as in the “Post reactions” table example, create a filter with the relevant dimension and follow the same above mentioned steps. Just play around with dimensions and filter selections to see what works best for you.

And that’s it! Those 3 pages General overview, Page analytics and Posts analytics make up the whole report. I would advise not to create too many pages so that the report does not become filled in with too much information, so that the viewer is drowning in a sea of data.

Facebook Page Insights reporting templates

In this section I will feature 3 free plug and play Facebook Insights templates you can use for free!

Supermetrics 3-page Facebook Insights Report

You can use the report shown in the article earlier as a template. Click this link to go to the Data Studio file.

Facebook Page overview from Optimizing Audience (by Benji Azaria)

This one-page template provides you a great overview of your page. It has all the metrics you need to see for a successful analysis of your Facebook page:

• Total likes
• New likes trendline
• 4 types of impressions: total, paid, organic, viral
• Likes split by age and gender
• Posts’ performance: likes, comments, shares and likes on post shares
• The total number of content clicks
• Positive and negative actions

This template was created with several Data Studio widgets, such as trendline, scorecards, bar chart and image.

Get the template’s copy from this great article by Optimizing Audience.

Facebook Insights template from Coast Digital (by Miguel Cedeno)

This template contains two pages – the first one provides a general overview on the key stats as well as the page audience’s demographics and the second one focuses on posts’ metrics. Click here to make a copy of this reporting template.

How to use reporting templates with Supermetrics Connectors

Just follow this simple guide to use any of Supermetrics Data Studio templates:

• Add Supermetrics Facebook Insights connector from Data Studio Community Connector Gallery. You will find more details on how to add it from this blog post.
• Open the template document. Click “Make a copy of the file” icon and when you see the “Create new report” pop-up choose your Supermetrics Facebook Insights connector as a new data source.

• After that click “Create report” and your copy of the file will be populated with the right data automatically.

Conclusion

This brings us to the end of this article about Facebook Page reporting! From the first part you learned what are the different metrics which can be found in Facebook Insights, what they mean and how they are different from each other.

Later on we looked at how to organize the relevant metrics in a neat 3-page report a marketing team could use to answer relevant questions. Also, you read more about Supermetrics’ Facebook Insights Connector and its superpowers and got 3 free reporting templates, which seamlessly work with this connector.

Hope you found this article helpful in your Facebook Page stats’ reporting!

Happy reporting!

About Anna Shutko

Anna is a Product Marketing Manager at Supermetrics. She is the force behind new product and feature releases, partnerships and reporting template galleries. You can find Anna’s LinkedIn profile and connect with her here.