The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Note: This post is the seventh installment in a series of excerpts from the Insider's Guide To Facebook Pages, a white paper from Clickable. Download the full guide. For help with your Facebook marketing, contact us.

You can’t succeed with digital marketing unless you’re measuring success. Experienced online advertisers have been doing this for years, particularly with search engine marketing (SEM), where metrics like “Impressions,” “Click-Through Rate” and “Conversion Rate” are the basis for any successful campaign. With Facebook, and particularly Face- book Pages, there is not yet a widely agreed-upon set of success metrics.

David Dunne of Velocidi explains the current situation: “The question of ‘the value of engagement’ has not yet been answered. A lot of people have broached the subject, but nobody has really quantified this. Marketers spend dollars in order to generate sales. There is a relationship between what happens on your Facebook Page and your sales. It’s the marketer’s job to make it as direct a relationship as possible.”

But one thing is clear, as Mark Spangler of Stuzo has pointed out. “Everybody wants their marketing to have a direct impact on sales.” (If you drive traffic from your Face- book Page to an eCommerce site, you can measure your impact on sales directly.)

Two Facebook-specific metrics, however, have emerged as essential: Page Views and “Likes.” (We expect that the recent introduction of “Talking About This” will soon add a third metric to that list.) We discuss both below. In addition, we review five metrics suggested by Buddy Media in their recent report, “The Five Most Important Metrics You Should Be Tracking on Facebook.”

1. Facebook News Feed Impressions 

“Impressions” are a familiar metric to marketers with experience in Search Engine Mar- keting (SEM), but they are slightly different on Facebook. A “News Feed Impression” occurs whenever “one of your posts are displayed in your fans’ News Feed.” Using the metrics described above, you can determine what percentage of Facebook users who see your content interact with it. (Buddy Media suggests that you set an initial bench- mark at “anything over .5% feedback.”)

2. Facebook Likes 

The “Like” button has become one of the most important and widely-used features on Facebook. Patrick Stokes of Buddy Media points out that marketers should not think of “Likes” as an abstract metric, but as a concrete statement by Facebook users about your company. “Liking a brand used to have a stigma, but that’s changed. Apple in some ways has led this movement. People now think of brands as part of their everyday life. Facebook has helped make that happen.” If a user “Likes” your page, that will be their first interaction with it. Future interactions, and deeper engagements, are tracked with other metrics.

3. Page Views 

The simplest indication of your success is Page Views: have you driven Facebook users to your page, or not? While this metric alone doesn’t give you nearly enough informa- tion, it is crucial to maximize your total Page Views. As T. J. Kelly of Edelman points out, “only a small percentage of content generated on Facebook is actually seen.”

4. Facebook Pages Tab Views

Tab Views, one of the five metrics suggested by Buddy Media in their report, provide a more granular perspective on your performance than Page Views. This is especially important if you create custom iFrames applications for tabs on your Page, because “you likely will present first time visitors with the most interactive and engaging experience” on your Page. (This quote, and others in this section, are drawn from Buddy Media’s white paper on Facebook metrics, cited above.) Taken together with Page Views and Likes, Tab Views tell you whether users are reaching the right pages on your site, or being diverted to less important content.

5. Engagements

Unlike “Page Views” or “Tab Views,” “Engagements” are a not concrete metric that would be measured the same way by all advertisers. “Engagements can be defined as the primary action that you want users to take within the custom content on your Page.” For some advertisers, or certain apps on Facebook Pages, an “Engagement” will range from filling out a survey to submitting a form to watching a video. For each of your tabs, or each of your specialized apps and posts, you will define “Engagement” differently. In this way, “Engagements” are similar to “conversions” in SEM.

6. Clicks

In the future, Facebook Pages may become a significant source of direct sales and eCommerce. But today, advertisers who want to drive sales using Facebook will most likely be driving traffic from their Facebook page to an external site. As Buddy Media puts it, “Your Facebook Page should not be a dead end street.”

If you have conversion tracking and analytics installed on your site, this metric will be easy to track. In your traffic reports, simply include a section that aggregates traffic from your Facebook URL. This will give you a clear sense of how well your Facebook Page is performing as a source of sales and traffic, especially relative to other sources.

7. Submits

Describing the unique value of marketing on Facebook, the company’s COO Sheryl Sandberg told the Wall Street Journal in 2010, “We enable effective word-of-mouth advertising at scale for the first time.” In concrete terms, this occurs when users recommend your content to their friends, by submitting it to their News Feed. “Each published message equates to one fan willing to vouch and evangelize for your brand.”

Download the full guide.