Facebook spruces up Page Insights with new features

Metrics are broken down and simplified, introduces scorecards for positive and negative feedback

Facebook has one one billion users, but that means nothing if it can't keep the brands and advertisers that promote content on the site happy. So it looks like Facebook is going on a big kick right now to simplify its product offerings for brands and advertisers.

Only a day after overhauling its ad tools to make them easier to use, Facebook is at it again, this time doing the same thing for its Page Insights, breaking them down into more categories that will be easier to follow, it was revealed on Wednesday.

The point of Page Insights is to help administrators understand if, and how, people are engaging with the content they publish.

The changes are based on feedback that the company got from Page owners and administrators who were allowed to use a version of it earlier this year. The new features, which are now being rolled out to all Page owners, were "highly requested," Facebook said.

So here's what's new.

First, Facebook is splitting up the People Talking About This (PTAT) metric in order "to help Page admins better see how people interact with their content." 

It will now be shown in five different sections: Page Likes, People Engaged, Page tags and mentions, Page checkins and other interactions on a Page. 

Facebook also renamed The Virality metric as the Engagement Rate and added clicks as part of its measurements " in order to help admins better gauge overall post quality."

In order to make it even simpler to see how users are engaging with a post, Facebook will now provide a score card for positive and negative interactions. A positive interaction is a like, comment, share or click. A negative interaction is hiding the post, reporting it as spam, or unliking the page.

In addition, Facebook also added the ability to see who the page has engaged (engagement, it should be noted, is calculated by the number of unique people who have clicked on, liked, commented on, or shared the page's posts), as well the ability for administrators to upload their own reporting  template for when they export the data.

Making it simpler for advertisers

This news follows Facebook announcement on Tuesday that it was introducing a new set of tools, which it is calling " objective-based ad buying and reporting," for advertisers. This allows businesses choose an "objective," after which Facebook will choose the right ad for them.

For Facebook, the ultimate goal here is to make sure that brands are reaching the right audience on Facebook, giving them more of an incentive to post and advertise on the network. 

Obviously brands will be turned off if their promotions are not working; remember what happened with General Motors right before Facebook's IPO last year? They pulled $10 million in advertising funds, saying that the ads they were running were not resulting in higher sales.

And the same thing could easily happen now, if ads and promotions running on Facebook stopped bringing in a profit.

Of course, Facebook seems to have learned a lot since then, and making it faster, and easier, for brands and advertisers to reach the right audiences on the network is one step in keeping everyone happy. 

(Image source: https://cognoscenti.wbur.org)