One of the key ways we measure success in social media marketing is through our analytics and reporting.

But as of June 30, 2021, Facebook has announced that they will no longer have analytics available on it’s pages and haven’t really been super clear about the alternatives. For social media managers – this bombshell as it was quietly announced, with a massive change that impact everyone working in social media — especially as it’s closing in on End Of Financial Year!

The summary:

• From June 30 2021, you will no longer be able to access Facebook Analytics from your Pages
• You will no longer be able to access or export historical data from Pages
• Ads will not be impacted and continue to report via Ads Manager Reporting.

The challenge for all of us is that if we’ve been measuring specific things to report internally, those metrics may suddenly not exist anymore. It’s important to chat to your boss / clients / bff now to let them know that your reporting may be impacted by the change.

If you use third-party tools for reporting, there is a risk that it won’t play nicely and some of this data may no longer be accessible, so it’s important to be aware of this change.

So how do we report without Facebook Analytics?

Facebook Business Suite

Facebook actually points us to Business Suite to access some of the data we used to have access to.

I call this Facebook Business Manager, and when I visited there, I had a new alert directing me to this page to see my insights: business.facebook.com/insights

This tool has all the Page Insights I regularly use in next little sections:

• Overview – a summary of all of the below features
• Trends – Overall page reach – including ads
• Content – data on individual posts that you can sort by likes, reach, comments and shares
• Demographics – age, gender, location

At first glance, I am actually really impressed with this new section – it’s clean and it has the information that 99% of social media managers need, without wading through loads of other data to get there.

Manual Monitoring

In the days before analytics, the way that we tracked the impact of social media channels was by putting aside time in our calendar of the first of each month, and manually wrote down data like follower numbers in an Excel document to track monthly growth because there was no way to access this data in the future.

We didn’t list the actual reach of posts, because that information wasn’t available, but listed ‘potential reach’ because we simply had no way to see the real data – just our best possible guess.

You may find something you used to track isn’t available in the new system. Manual tracking isn’t glamorous, but in some cases, it might be your only option.

External Analytics

If tracking link clicks is important to you, you make want to tag your links with bit.ly tags, UTM tags or analyse traffic sources using your website analytics like Google Analytics. Yep, Facebook is one place to see what’s happening in your business, but it’s not the only place and using a combination of tools may give you richer insights.

Summary

I believe the Facebook Business Suite Insights is actually better than the previous Page Analytics section because it has nearly everything social media managers actually report on, all in one section.

Yes, there may be other things we report on where we might need to adapt my manually recording data or using third-party tools to assist but I’m hopeful that this new tool ticks the boxes for most people looking to report on their Facebook data!

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Want to work with Rachel?

Rachel Beaney is a writer and social media content specialist, helping businesses connect with their audiences.

She’s worked with local, national and global companies, in addition to not-for-profits and government bodies. She loves helping businesses tell their stories with creative and data-driven solutions.

She is based in Sydney, Australia.

Want to work together? Rachel would love to hear from you. Get in touch today.