So you got to that point: you found out what digital marketing is, and you liked it. Then you found out that there is no such thing as marketing without some minimal tracking of what’s happening on the site. So you discovered that there is Google Analytics, an unfailing tool for data analysis, and you started recommending to friends (and then clients) that they activate it to track the website.
Then the game got complicated, and the arrival of social didn’t help. You opened Facebook pages, wrote posts, studied editorial plans, and eventually began to verticalize on paid social advertising. And, from experience, we know that this is where heads can start to turn. Why?
Meanwhile, because the data analytics tools start to become so many, especially when we start exploring Facebook’s: between Facebook Analytics, Facebook Insights and Facebook Attribution there is definitely plenty of material to be able to work with the numbers. But then, more importantly, because when you start comparing Facebook and Google Analytics data, the numbers don’t match up.
But don’t worry, friend/friend of the Internet, because in this article we are going to answer a whole series of recurring doubts, coming not only from those new to Google and Facebook tracking, but also to remove some doubts that may appear even in the reasoning of more seasoned professionals.
In this article we will discuss:
- What tools to use for data analysis
What is the difference between Google Analytics and Facebook Insights?
Let’s start with the easy stuff. Especially those who are new to social activities will have become acquainted with one of the first analytics tools offered by Facebook: Facebook Insights. It is one of the first tools you learn about when approaching Facebook, because it is easily accessible among the tools provided to those who have created a social page.
Facebook Insights provides very interesting data for a social media manager: post likes, page follows, audience reached, video views, and more. But the data fails to reach beyond what is recorded inside the social platform: everything that happens after the clicks that lead to your site is not recorded by Insights, which in fact is limited to “social” actions only, and moreover does not exactly take into account the ads part. At the same time, you cannot monitor Facebook with Google Analytics, precisely because the latter only tracks what happens on the site.
Connecting Facebook to Google Analytics
While it is true that Facebook data is unrelated to what we record in Google Analytics, the question may arise: how do we link Facebook to Google Analytics so that we can get a clearer idea of how our social activities (paid and unpaid) impact business? Actually, there is no real link, but it is possible to create a kind of “grouping” of all traffic and results from Facebook.
Connecting Facebook to Google Analytics is, therefore, not an automatic step where all it takes is a click, but it is necessary to know how to carefully read the values of certain traffic items or, better yet, set upstream the Google Analytics account itself. How? The ways of doing this are many and equally effective. Here are examples below:
- Read the Source/Meaning section: you will notice, if you have traffic from Facebook, that in the Source/Meaning view Facebook appears several times, in slightly different ways from each other. Just keep track of all the entries that have this specific source.
- Create a new Channel Grouping: this is among the most effective solutions because it allows you to group all the traffic generated by Facebook (and beyond) within a single entry in the Channel section and which can then be compared to other channels without having many entries all the same with fragmented results.
- Create a segment: this is a very similar solution to the previous one with the difference that the segment is an active filter compared to channel grouping. This allows you to create better analyze past data in case you have historical data that you have never grouped until now.
Certainly, we will not have important data such as the spend of social campaigns precisely because Google Analytics does not allow a direct connection with the tool, and as a result, the comparison of the data will always be partial, thus constituting a hindrance in terms of a well-rounded analysis.
Read also: Google Tag Manager’s Data Layer: what it is and why it is important
Comparing Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics
After dozens of years of data analysis and trend reading made possible practically only through the goodness of mommy Google, Facebook has come up with its own alternative for metrics analysis no longer of just the page or ad campaigns, but of our entire digital ecosystem.
The real strength that sets Facebook Analytics apart from its Google counterpart is in the fact that it can track business results not only from what is happening on the site or in the app, but also by joining the traffic flows coming in from social pages. For example, we could ask Facebook Analytics to tell us how many purchase actions on the site happened starting with a like to the last post published, or how many “Ahah” reactions became a signup to the site or app. This is possible because Facebook records and holds both data about what happens on social and what happens afterward.
At the same time, however, Google Analytics remains the benchmark for studying data about what happens within the site or app. Being a platform with many more years of development (Facebook Analytics was born in 2018, Google Analytics back in 2005), Google’s solution offers in-depth details and views that can really give us a clearer idea about what is happening within individual pages and how they relate to the rest of the path we offer the user each time they visit. Not that Facebook can’t do that, but to get similar data, the process, in some cases, can be cumbersome or not possible. Instead, for simpler data analysis, Facebook’s solution in our opinion may be a bit more pleasing and user friendly to the eye.
Does it make sense to use both? A good idea might be to take a look at the Analytics platform for you “secondary” just to verify that what we record from one side is actually confirmed by another.
At this point it’s easy to think that both Facebook Analytics and Google Analytics are great platforms both for measuring what’s happening on the site and app and for figuring out which traffic channel the results are coming from.
Right? Instead, it’s wrong.
Unfortunately, the biggest flaw of both platforms is that they are blind to the impact of ad campaigns. If my YouTube campaign works, I will probably get visits from people who later search for my brand on Google, but who probably did not visit directly from YouTube.
In such a scenario, Analytics cannot trace the campaign back to the campaign that generated the result. If I activated a paid Facebook campaign to increase purchases to my site, it is not certain that users will click on posts and buy. Maybe they will sign up and sleep on it. Maybe they won’t even click on the paid post. Yet they might convert in the following days because of exposure to the ads.
Learn how to do conversion tracking and monitoring on your website properly.
It is therefore essential to read the results on advertising platforms, such as Google Ads Manager and Facebook Ads Manager. And this data will most likely be superior to the data coming in on Analytics, which does not always get credit for ad campaigns and more often reports it to other origins, such as direct traffic and organic search. For this reason, those who do Facebook campaigns will certainly have noticed how frequent the discrepancy between Analytics and Facebook campaign results is.
Faced with this situation of uncertainty in reading the data, Facebook has been coming to the rescue for some time now with a dedicated tool: Facebook Attribution, in fact, is the free platform that can help us divide up the real merits of our traffic sources, even in cases where more than one channel contributed before the final result.
Conclusion: which tools to use?
It is difficult to recommend a single tool that can cover all data needs. Analytics tools are accurate in telling us what happens inside our sites but are not adept at interpreting what happens before the site is visited. On the other hand, Ads Managers tend to give results that do not take into account the complex path a user takes before arriving at the business result, a result often achieved by going through multiple channels, multiple days of consideration, and multiple devices on which our business was visited.
Our advice is nothing more than to do what we do every day: use (and learn about) all the essential analytics tools and let them talk to each other. The alternative is to place blind trust in a single data source and run the risk of making business choices based on an incomplete reading of the scenario.
