When you run an ad campaign in Facebook to get more fans for your business page, you’re able to analyze your performance using Facebook Insights. Recently, Facebook completely removed the old version of Insights and made their new version mandatory.

If you’re not familiar with the new Insights, they feature more in-depth and granular information useful to analyzing user interaction. Not only can this information be used to measure ad campaign performance, it can be used to identify potential areas to improve that performance. Below is a list of some of the new features and how they can be utilized.

Post Types

The main page shows a graph overview of user interaction over a specified date period. The level of user interaction is correlated to the posts made on your business page’s wall by you or another administrator. This is extremely helpful in explaining any spikes in user interaction as each post is listed below the graph with a viral percentage, which tells you how many people interacted with one of your posts versus how many people viewed it.

When a post has a high viral percentage, the post was relatively popular. The viral percentage may indicate what type of content (news story, video, picture, etc.) or specific material users like interacting with. Any consistently popular type of post may prove beneficial to utilize in advertisements promoting them.

Likes

Likes tell you the demographics of your fans and how they came to like your page. This can be useful in identifying what kind of ad campaigns work best to attract fans. Say you run a sponsored story campaign in the first week of December, and a sponsored like campaign for the second week. The Like tab allows you to compare these two date ranges and determine which brought in more likes.

An important note about this section is that the “ads and sponsored stories” source only tells you how many fans clicked the like button on the advertisement itself. It does not tell you how many people entered your page through an ad and then clicked “like” on your business page’s wall or landing page.

Reach

Reach tells you what your total potential audience is. Several graphs in the Reach section tell you how many and what kind of users viewed or interacted with posts about you on their wall and, in cases where they came to your page, where they entered from. This information can be very useful in deciding what demographics to target in your ad campaigns.

Talking About This

Talking About This tells you about users who actually interact with your page. Data from this section can influence not only demographic targeting of sponsored story ads, but the kind of posts you utilize for these ads. By comparing surges in interaction and what you posted for that day, you can see which types of posts get the most attention.

These features and other data found in Facebook Insights will be beneficial in identifying your potential, increasing user interaction and engagement. So long as your Facebook ads are designed to send users to your business page and spur likes/interaction (which you should be), Insights will become your best friend when in the realm of Facebook paid search.

For more on Facebook marketing, check out one of our earlier posts.