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Facebook launched it’s Analytics product this year, and we haven’t seen much written about it in the Australian market. We think it’s an amazing tool, so I write this blog in the hopes that this article gets more people to explore the platform.
Most of us are familiar with Google Analytics, and Facebook analytics is similar. The platform gives you insight about user behaviour on your website in the same way Google Analytics does. A great thing about this platform is that it doesn’t need any additional setup apart from the standard Facebook pixel installation, which many of you will already have implemented.
Today I will show you how to set up Facebook Analytics for your business, and build audience filters using Facebook Analytics. Facebook Analytics audiences can be very precise and targeted, beyond what you can do in the standard Facebook audience builder.
How to access Facebook Analytics
Firstly, to access the Facebook Analytics, log into Business Manager. Click the burger icon (those 3 stacked lines) on the top left, hover over all tools, and under Measure & Report select Analytics.
Then, you need to choose your Facebook pixel. If your business is new, or you don’t have enough data attached to your pixel, you may need to wait a while for your Analytics dashboard to become visible. If you’ve been working on Facebook for a while, you should be fine. Once you access the platform you will be taken to the main Facebook Analytics dashboard that looks like this:
How to create filters
Now, we can start building our Facebook Analytics audiences. We need to first create a filter in order to create an audience.
To create a filter, click on the “+ Add Filter” button in the top navigation bar to see the options to choose from. You can create a filter based on an event, demographic, app, device, ads, and web parameters. For more precision you can add more attributes to the filter.
We’re going to build 3 different audiences that you can use for direct targeting in advertising or to build lookalike audiences.
Audience 1: Add to cart more than once
This is an audience for users who have added to cart more than once.
We tested this audience for an ecommerce client and it worked very well. This audience is best when used in your dynamic remarketing campaigns to compliment your remarketing strategy. We attached a discount code to the creative and saw a good lift in ROAS and purchases.
To create the audience you need to have add-to-cart events configured in your Facebook pixel.
Click on the “+ Add Filter” button, then choose performed an event then Add to Cart.
Further refine this audience by choosing Event Count and set it to greater than 1.
You should have a filter similar to this in the end.
Finally, create the audience by clicking on the purple drop down arrow and choose Create Custom Audience.
This is a great audience to use as a lookalike audience.
Audience 2: Top 25% purchasers by value
This audience captures the top 25% of high value customers. This audience is also great for lookalike audiences and upselling to these high value customers. If you have an upsell campaign, this audience will improve segmentation. You can attach a catalogue with high value products and serve these to high value customers.
To build this, we’ll create a filter like we did for the first audience. So, click the “+ Add Filter” button, choose performed an event, then choose Purchases.
Next, add a value to Purchases. For this example, choose with greater value than a percentage of people.
Finally, set the percentage to 75% of people.
Audience 3: Google URL referrer audience
This audience is based on when users come from Google searches. Facebook Analytics already has a native search engine filter and domain filter but we have found both to be a little finicky. So as a workaround, we use the URL referrer filter.
We have used this audience in remarketing campaigns for an ecommerce client that ran both Google and Facebook ads. We wanted to separate these two forms of traffic for better remarketing attribution. It’s not a perfect solution since it’s not channel specific (e.g. organic vs paid) but it gives us a good idea of performance for users who interacted with the brand via Google prior to interacting with a Facebook ad.
To build this audience, we’ll start by creating a filter in the same way we did in the last 2 examples. This time choose matching web parameter, then choose Referrer URL and set the value to Contains Google. You will need to type the word ‘google’ and enter it.
You should end up having a filter that looks like this.
Again, create this audience by clicking the purple dropdown menu and selecting Create Custom Audience.
Closing thoughts
With the 3 audience examples in this blog, hopefully you can see how Facebook Analytics can give you an edge by building more sophisticated audiences. I have only given 3 examples but the audience opportunities are limitless.
I hope this article was helpful and please reach out if you discover more Facebook Analytics hacks you’d like to share.
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