They’ve got a great selling point: Facebook insights doesn’t do the job for gaining actionable data. But can Pagelever deliver the goods? We’re about to find out.
Getting Started
I was really excited to check-out this new tool and eagerly signed-up for my free trial. Unfortunately, I was denied immediate gratification as I was notified that they needed to create my dashboard and would get back to me.
After waiting a few days, I contacted customer support and was notified that I had neglected to select the pages that I wanted to be active. After completing this step, I was up and running. You can find the ‘Manage Facebook Pages’ tab under ‘Settings’. Once contacted, their support staff was very responsive and gave me the help I needed.
Fan Growth On Steroids
The Pagelever interface is segmented into easy to maneuver categories including Growth, Visibility, Engagement, Posts and Reports. Let’s start with the one that has been the go-to social media metric since day one, fan growth.
Step one is selecting the dates that you want to examine. You can choose several pre-set options such as prior 20 days, 30 days or 60 days OR you can make a custom selection. My data appears to go back as far as April 2011. However, Pagelever does admit that Facebook only allows them to ‘retrieve post data on posts newer than 30 days in most cases.’ This information is archived within Pagelever, so older data will accumulate over time.
The Growth tab houses an impressive amount of data and displays the total new fans and removed fans for the specified time period. It also calculates a growth rate percentage and compares that to the pages past performance. This allows you to quickly access whether or not your page content is doing a good job at recruiting and retaining fans.
Pagelever also provides some insight into WHERE your new fans are coming from. Under ‘Growth Sources’ they outline the top sources for both new fans and removed fans. These buckets include items such as Facebook ads, Facebook stream, Fan page, Fan box, friend suggestions, Facebook search, etc.
Who’s Coming to Dinner?
Pagelever also houses a considerable amount of fan demographic info like age, gender, country and city. The tool lists the communities where you have seen the most growth, the lowest growth and overall fan demographics. This is very helpful in assessing the effectiveness of targeted Facebook ads and your content in general.For example, If you are running a Facebook ad campaign to recruit fans for Absolute Vodka and the majority of new users are males age 13-17 you may want to consider re-targeting your ads.
Page Views vs Newsfeed Impressions
Under the Visibility tab, you can gain some insight into exactly WHAT’s being seen and when. Page views are compared to newsfeed impressions and this data might be quite surprising. Generally, brands are getting the most visibility from the newsfeed NOT from users visiting their Facebook page. This might help make the argument that putting beaucoup dollars into developing Facebook tabs isn’t the best allocation of resources. Instead, hiring someone who can create engaging newsfeed posts will likely get you a better ROI in the long-run.
Also interesting are the graphs showing internal and external Facebook referral sources. You can determine how effect your newsfeed is at recruiting users already on Facebook to view your page.
Shall We Get Engaged?
This is where it really gets interesting. The overview starts by listing your most interactive posts for your selected time period. At-a-glance you can see how many people SAW the post and how many of them interacted with it. They sum it all up in a nifty little Engagement Rate metric for each post. I was a bit stunned at how low my ER% was across the board, having previously based my interaction rate NOT on impressions but on the number of fans. This then had me asking how accurate were the impression metrics. The only info I could find on that was a simple definition on their website:
Stream Views or Impressions: The number of times people (Fans and non-Fans) have viewed a News Feed story posted by your Page.
Having read on allfacebook.com that a 1% feedback or engagement rate was something to shoot for, this new calculation meant I had some work to do. Again, actionable insights!
Pagelever also delves into WHERE your engagement is coming from. They provide charts that show how many of your comments and likes are coming from mobile devices, the newsfeed, Facebook search, etc.
The Devil is in the Details
Under the ‘Posts’ section you can get granular post details including engagement rate, total impressions, total likes and comments and demographics on the users who engaged with the post.
Pagelever also boasts that you can see the life-cycle of a post by taking a look at the impressions timeline where they record the post impressions and interactions by the hour. They advise to wait until one post ‘dies’ in the newsfeed before making your next update. Citing that inundating page fans with too many active posts can drive up the unsubscribe rate. I love this in theory. Unfortunately I was unable to access this handy timeline for my posts. Pagelever includes this disclaimer below the impression timeline feature:
“Unfortunately, Facebook only updates their data with us every once in a while, so we can’t keep this graph real-time.
We’ll be working out different ways to get better quality data here, though.”
Pagelever founder, Jeff Widman, checked into this issue and explained that the timeline feature will only aggregate data on posts that were distributed after signing up for Pagelever. You can read more updates from Jeff in the comments section of this post.
Pagelever PDF Reports = Weak Tea
Pagelever offers one standard report currently that’s exportable in a PDF format. Unfortunately this report doesn’t provide information on one of the most important metrics that their tool offers, engagement rate. You have to log into the main dashboard to see that number. Unfortunately, I don’t think any of my clients would find this report very useful.
The report does offer insight into fan growth and the overall growth rate. It also compares the visibility of the newsfeed vs actual Facebook page views. In terms of engagement, the report outlines the most engaged demographic and the % of daily active fans.
The last segment on their standard report includes a look at the most popular unique posts, comparing impressions, likes and comments but no engagement rate. A great addition to Pagelever’s offerings would include the ability to export ALL of the graphs and data within the tool. That way, strategists could piece together reports with the most relevant data for their clients.
To Buy or Not to Buy…
To sum it up, I feel that Pagelever is an extremely useful tool that would allow brands to truly optimize their Facebook presence. For brands that have a large following and rely heavily on keeping the community engaged, this tool is invaluable. I would highly recommend it for full-time community managers that are tasked with ensuring they get max eyeballs on their content.
And for smaller businesses, the low price-point has me asking the question why NOT? A standard account is only $34 bucks per month and would allow Facebook page managers insight into who’s listening and responding. Again, invaluable. You can sign-up and find all pricing options on Pagelever’s website.
Stats Provided:
Engagement rate of each Facebook post:
Engagement rate = (likes + comments)/Impressions
Gender of Engaged users/Location of engaged users:
By researching your most interactive posts, you can target updates to the gender and location that comment most often, thereby increasing interactions and impressions.
Daily Engagement Rate:
Total number of daily engagements/total number of daily impressions
Average Engagement Rate per post:
Total number of engagements per a unique post/number of impressions for the post
Number of post per type:
Posts categorized by type (links, photos, flash) for a specific time period.
Average Engagement Rate by Type:
Total number of engagements per type/total number of impressions for that type of post.