About a year ago Jeff Hammerbacher left Facebook because “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads, that sucks.”

Today it seems that those “best minds” didn’t really do a good job of increasing clickability. Much of this may be due to the superficial and simplistic Analysis tools that Facebook offers page admins and advertisers.

We think Facebook could make more data available on Facebook Insights to give marketers the tools to increase their reach, brand awareness and ultimately profitability from their platform. After all, marketers are a bright bunch, and given the right tools they could leverage more out of Facebook.

We have thought out a few reports and metrics that Facebook could offer marketers in their Facebook Insights.

Unique User Frequency Reporting

Currently we have a really simple graph of Unique User Frequency:

We can’t really drill down to see which of those segments did what. Did the users that visited a page 21+ engage in any way other than view your content? Are the first time visitors sharing statuses and images you are posting?

How about correlating this with other dimensions such as geography, age, gender? Maybe males are the ones visiting or seeing our statuses more often. Maybe not.

In essence this graph puts everyone in the same bucket and doesn’t let us know what type of users are the ones that lean towards the right side of the graph. An essential part of gathering insights is the ability to segment and correlate metrics to other dimensions to see if there is anything proportionately different from one segment to another.

The above graph tells us nothing about how we could improve engagement. It just sets a benchmark of how you are perfroming now across ALL your users.

Cross Device “Multi Channel” Reporting

Google Analytics has recently developed multi channel reporting. It allows us to see the sources of a unique user across several visits. So a user coming in through a PPC ad on their first visit and direct traffic on their second helps us understand that the PPC ad was somewhat influential in “introducing” a site to said user.

Since cookies are limited to a device and browser we can’t see if a user visited first with a desktop, had their second visit on an iPad and finally made a purchase with an android device.

Facebook can track this because you are always logged in. They know what devices you are accessing their site with more often. They should be able to tell if users visit Facebook with a mobile device in the morning, a desktop throughout the day and a mobile device in the evening again.

If Facebook had mobile advertising (which it doesn’t) you could curate your ad content according to user’s devices. The data could also be correlated with age/gender, so you would know to target mobile advertising to a younger demographic that is female because the reports may tell you that 78% of all mobile traffic in the afternoon is primarily females from 25-34.

As it stands we have a useless little mobile report which shows us the breakdown of “Likes” from a mobile device vs “on page” without any possibility of drilling down to correlate with other dimensions:

Internal Referral Source

Facebook gives us “external referrers” report:

But we all know that most of the traffic coming to our Facebook pages is from internal traffic. Is there a specific demographic for influencers which attract more visits to your page? We can’t tell.

Imagine you could reach out to those influencers and get them more involved in your product/service.

Custom tags for “All Post Types”

Facebook also offers you the ability to filter the types of posts you have published:

What’s interesting is that you can tell which types of posts really succeeded at engaging users. Imagine Facebook allowed you the ability to segment your post types with any customized tag you wanted. So if you have a website that sells dresses, tops, shoes and handbags you could label your posts for each of these “categories.” Do handbags have more of an effect? When we talk about dresses does it create more engagement than shoes? Could we segment this data by age/gender? All this info would help us to better target our users base.

Like Acquisitions vs. Unsubscribe Rate

We currently have “Where Your Likes Came From” report. But unchecking the “New Likes” does not change any of the data on the “likes sources” on the right. So essentially we can never tell which is which.

How about correlating like unsubscribes with visitor recency? Age/Gender? Languages/Geographic location? Nope, Nope and nope.

Is there anyone listening to marketers at Facebook?

Facebook is having a difficult time these days. Their stock plummeted, they purchased Instagram and so far haven’t done anything with it. But worse of all they don’t offer marketers tools that could help us create a better ROI. So where are the “genius data scientists” that Jeff was talking about?

What reports would you like to see on Facebook? Share them below. We would love your “insights!”