CXL Institute Digital Analytics Minidegree Review #6
I’m not a huge Facebook guy but I’ve been trying to learn Facebook ads. I hear a lot of great things you can do with Facebook Ads. Create interactive ads, retarget custom audiences, target specific groups of people interested in specific niches. I know the basics of Facebook ads just like Google but I don’t know how to figure out the analytics until I took Chris Mercer’s Facebook Analytics course. Facebook analytics seems more easier than Google Analytics. I’ve learned how to read and utilize reports in Facebook Analytics dashboard. Exciting and informative stuff. Just like Google, I had a hard time analyzing my Facebook data. Mercer makes learning marketing data analytics fun to learn. He opened my eyes on how to look at data and create & analyze it. He made me more into a critical thinker. I should play around with my data and figure this out. I now know better what to do with my data.
I like the Facebook analytics user interface. It’s a bit of a learning curve but it’s not too hard to understand. It’s pretty cool with what you can do with it. With Facebook analytics, you can also get behavior interactions of Instagram users. It’s very powerful. It can also be used with Google Tag Manager but you have to set it up as custom HTML. Something else that Mercer showed me how to do. It’s an extra step where you have to inject code but it’s not too difficult to do. Facebook's data provides a lot of unique and valuable information of users behavior on Facebook and Instagram. It’s just as detailed maybe more than Google Analytics/tag manager. Just like Google Analytics, Facebook has a demo analytics account. It was very helpful. with it, I was able to play around with the data. Playing around with data and funnels was fun. It can provide interesting data that you would not think about. Based on that, you can decide what to do with your Facebook Ads campaign. Increase your budget, reach, or just simply cut it.
Mercer shows there're many things that you can do with Facebook Analytics. The Facebook advertising platform is really cool and It’s crazy how they developed something like this. Their algorithm and advertising is very interesting. I’ve learned from Mercer that everything is an “event” In Facebook. Events can come from different sources. You can have a source group. Sources that send events can be grouped. He goes on to show that you can also set up business asset groups (for business assets) and private groups. Private groups are similar to event source groups. The difference is an event source group, you can share with other members of your team.
Other features and things you can see on Facebook analytics are: Active Users (User Activity, gender), Revenue (purchases), Funnels (description of funnel walkthrough), Retention, Cohorts, Breakdowns (you can breakdown your data), outcomes (outcome of your ads), Journey (journey of users), Percentiles, Events, Overlap (overlap of users), and Lifetime value. Under People section, you can see demographics (who are your users? what are they into?), Interests (what topics are your users interested in?) and Technology (what channels, devices are they using?).
The Funnels feature is probably the most useful and informative feature in Facebook Analytics. You can see what users went from page views to add to cart to purchase. You can see user behavior based on the set up you create. In the course he shows page views- to add to cart- to purchases. For every step, you can see a huge percentage of users activity drop down. This provides interesting information for conversion research. What we can do to increase add to cart, purchase, etc. There’s so much ability what you can do with funnel creation. I like how it’s so visualized it makes it easier for me to understand what’s going on. I definitely need to play around more with Facebook analytics especially with the funnels feature. The funnels feature shows your conversions. Just like Google Analytics, you can set up filtering. Mercer goes into these details in the course. He shows you can add a lot of filters and show UTM campaigns. There are conditions that you can set up and filter that will provide valuable information. I love how visualized the Facebook dashboard is. I’m a visualized person so it help when data is presented visually. I’ve learned that you should present and read data as if it’s a story.
Mercer shows some cool info from his website measurementmarketing.io. It’s cool how he set up his stuff. Some cool data that he shows from his website. I could see what users behavior and journey are on his site. It seems like he’s doing well in his Facebook advertising efforts. Facebook has some pretty good resources for help. They even have Facebook for developers. Their help desk provides a lot of helpful information for analytics and development.
Facebook is something that I had a little intimidation but taking Mercer’s Facebook Analytics course made me want to practice and learn Facebook even more. Mercer makes me think like an analyst should think. I get Facebook ads daily. Some crappy ones and some really good ones. I wonder how other people run their ad campaigns and how they’re doing. I wonder how everyone else measures their data from their ads campaigns. This course has made me go to an extra step of becoming a Facebook Analytics pro. I still have to go over everything again and practice. Facebook isn’t a difficult platform, I just feel like theirs a secret formula that I have to find out in order to run really successful campaigns. I’ve taken Facebook ads courses before. I learned the basics mostly and some psychological, copywriting and design skills. But the Analytics is where I feel short on. This course has helped me better understand Facebook’s marketing data. I’m hoping to become a Facebook Ads Pro in the future. I know I have ways to go. I need to stay consistent and practice.
