Extracting Hard Data from Facebook Campaigns

Tell your CEO that Facebook is going to play an integral role in your upcoming marketing strategy and you may be met with a dramatic—and possibly involuntary—eye roll. Facebook may be fine to support an advertising campaign or to foster community support, he or she might say, but there's really nothing strategic about it. But Facebook offers more solid data, analytics, and tracking options than a billboard could in its wildest dreams.

When I received a copy of Facebook Marketing: Designing Your Next Marketing Campaign by Justin R. Levy in the mail the other day, I naturally flipped right to the measurement section. Like everyone and their mother, I have a personal Facebook account that I use mainly to post facetious links on my friends' walls—but I'm not very familiar with the measurement possibilities that come with fan pages.

Knowing that Facebook pulled in about $800 million in revenue during 2009, I figured there would be many metrics. I was right.

When you create a Facebook fan page, you automatically can access the Insights functionality. This allows page administrators to access a whole slew of stats that will make any marketer's mouth water. They include:

• How many fans have subscribed and unsubscribed
• The breakout between male and female
• The breakout between age groups
• The number of page views you've received
• The number of discussion posts
• The number of posts and updates people have made on your page
• An approximated score on post quality
• The number of interactions your community has had on the page
• The number of interactions per post

Imagine what marketing strategy would be like if you had access to all of that information for every aspect of traditional advertising campaign. This is one of the many reasons advertising is only going to continue to shift toward online—you know exactly who you're reaching and can constantly tailor your message to better connect with them.

And if you choose to advertise through Facebook, even more data options are available to you. The ad platform allows you to buy cost-per-click and cost-per-impression ads. According to Levy, the analytics for these features include:

• Current bid
• Number of impressions
• Number of clicks
• Click-through rate
• Average cost-per-click or cost-per-impression
• Reports detailing advertising performance, responder demographics, and responder profiles
• Your total spend on the ad

These features are comparable to what Google ads offer, but allow you to target a more specific group of consumers. Not too shabby for a social network.

What's more, the data you gather on Facebook can be used to benefit other areas of your marketing program. For the June issue of Healthcare Marketing Advisor I spoke to Michelle Davis, director of marketing operations and community development at Lowell (MA) General Hospital, about the organization's new mommy blog. One of the reasons Davis decided to launch a site for local mothers is that she used Facebook Insight to determine that 67% of their fans were women and that the majority of women fans were between 18 and 44 years old.

It's not enough to simply create a Facebook page any more—you've got to cultivate a community and analyze that community's demographics and habits and use that information to create more effective campaigns.

Now there's a strategy that will make your CEO's eyes focus.