It has come to our attention that some number of marketers under 100% of all marketers are using tools other than Raven Tools. This will not stand! If, for whatever reason, you’re using some other suite of analytics software, you’re doing yourself a disservice. What’s more, you’re wasting time.
Today, I’m going to tell you why Raven is better in every way than using the default Facebook Insights.
What? I can hear you crying out from here. Facebook Insights, you say, is a perfectly fine, robust tool! After all, just look at everything it can do!
- An overview tab with a great selection of information, including page likes over time, post reach, engagement for of different types, all filtered by a time selection of your choosing.
- A likes tab that shows your fan page growth over time, rise or fall, including a day-by-day graph of likes you’ve earned each day. If that wasn’t enough, it can also show you where those likes came from.
- A readout of your reach, in all forms, from organic to paid to viral. A breakdown of actions on the tab, showing the likes, comments and shares each post earns.
- A cool visits tab that shows where, specifically, users visit when they view your page, as well as any actions taken on those pages, from check-ins to likes, plus a graph showing referral traffic by day from external sites.
- A posts tab that shows a wealth of data on individual posts, including their reach, what type of reach, the number of clicks and the number of engagement metrics for each post, all categorized by type of post and sortable by any metric.
- A people tab, showing you a full readout of demographic information, including age, gender, location down to the city level, language spoken and more.
- A competitor tracking panel for pages to monitor, for good or for ill, to see what they’re doing on Facebook including their growth.
All of that sounds positively wonderful, you’re right. Yes, I know you’re giving me a funny look, I tapped into your webcam for this conversation. I’m agreeing with you! Facebook Insights are detailed, robust an awesome. I think so to.
That’s why I use Raven tools.
Here’s why: Raven tools taps into your Facebook Insights to pull every last bit of that information and collate it in new and interesting ways.
- Raven applies basic critical thinking and comparisons to the raw data Facebook provides, to not only give you the raw information, but give you actionable intelligence from it as well.
- Raven allows you to generate custom reports with whatever data you want, for whatever time frame you want, and nothing but that data. Want a special report delivered to you once a month about your growth, your individual engagement metrics, your reach and your pageviews? You can do it, all with one easy report, with graphs, tables and everything you could want.
- Obviously, Raven includes social scheduling tools to allow you to schedule your posts to appear at the peak of visibility. How does it know when those peak hours are? Through examination of the data Facebook provides, of course.
Okay, sure. Other tools can do the same sort of thing, I understand that. You might not have the same fancy reports, but you’ll get some kind of report. You might not have information laid out in the same stark, black and white way with actionable intelligence, but you’ll get the same information. After all, all these tools pull from the same data sources, don’t they?
Raven takes it one step further.
Picture a GooGoo bar. No idea what that is? Me either, but that’s the metaphor Raven used in that blog post. I’m discarding it, because comparing Raven to a cheap candy bar, even a deluxe cheap candy bar, is doing it a disservice.
The point is, Raven doesn’t just pull in and analyze your Facebook Insights data. The tool also, if you give it access, can pull information from your Google Analytics installation on your website. This gives you access to way more data than you had just from Facebook. How much more? Think:
- All GA primary dimensions for traffic and referrals.
- All tracking information for landing pages, exit pages and everything in between.
- All the custom information you could ask for pulled from your AdWords campaigns.
- All of your goals and goal tracking, along with custom Raven goal analysis.
- Audience analysis, including mobile analysis, geographic analysis, browser and OS targeting, frequency and the variation between new and returning users.
- All sorts of additional social analysis, including conversions, network referrals – including Facebook – and a great overview.
- Easy and automatic color-coding to see rises and falls in metrics as they happen.
So you have all of your Facebook Insights data pulled into Raven, and you have all of your Google Analytics data, both regarding Facebook and regarding your website in general, all in one place. You then have all of Raven’s analytical tools layered on top, to give you any conceivable report you could ask for, comparing metrics, monitoring changes and providing advice every step of the way.
You then have all of those reports – and nothing more, should you desire – delivered to you on a schedule as regularly as you could desire. Want weekly updates to your reports? You can generate a PDF at will.
There’s one more thing. Do you manage more than one Facebook page? More than one website? What about your team? Do you have different people working on different aspects of your social experience and your website marketing? Do you have team members who shouldn’t have access to all of this data and all of these tools?
If so, Raven is perfect. You can monitor multiple Facebook pages and profiles at a time. You can monitor multiple websites worth of Google Analytics. You can compile it all into one report, or divide it through different user accounts. You can even provide certain clients or management teams to have access to read-only reports, so they can see but not tamper with your data.
I stand by my claim; if you’re not using Raven, you’re missing out on some seriously useful data.