Facebook quietly sunsetted their free tool, Facebook Analytics, as of June 30, 2021. Until then, people had access to reports and insights, and they were able to export charts and tables.
Monitoring your analytics is crucial no matter what type of advertising you invest in. Analytics help marketers and advertisers increase their Return on Investment (ROI) by providing detailed insights on how audiences interact with Facebook ads. The bad news is that many businesses relied on Facebook Analytics to do that for them.
But the good news is, Facebook hasn’t left their users high and dry. The closure of Facebook Analytics is part of Facebook’s strategy to consolidate its marketing tools but you can still use alternative tools to track growth, engagement and monetization activities on Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook points users to the following business tools to use:
Facebook Business Suite: Allows users to manage their Facebook and Instagram business accounts. Offers detailed insights about a business’s audience, content, and trends (but is not available to everyone).
Ads Manager: Lets businesses view, make changes, and see results for Facebook campaigns and ads.
Events Manager: Can help users set up and manage Facebook business tools like the Facebook pixel and Conversions API. Also reports on actions taken on a business’s website, app, and physical store.
And of course there are other purchased programs like Hootsuite, Loomly, Buffer, etc. that track your social media analytics.
Facebook Analytics is used to connect data from a Facebook page with data from the Facebook pixel. When the data is connected, Analytics can show a conversion path between a customer engaging with a business’s content and eventually making a purchase off of Facebook.
That data has recently become more difficult to track using any tool – with or without Facebook Analytics. That’s because of an update in iOS 14 which asks users whether or not they want to be tracked by apps on their phone.
If a user says they don’t want the Facebook app to track them, then it’s not possible for businesses to get the same conversion data from the user as they previously could.
Facebook has not given a reason for closing Analytics, so it’s not known whether the decision has anything to do with the iOS update.