Dashboard for Facebook and Instagram: Do you know how to prepare yours?

If you work in digital marketing, you’ve probably ever needed to have a dashboard for your Facebook and Instagram profiles, with all the data well integrated and with the information needed to make the right decisions.

Because if you want to know which Instagram post worked best last month, which day of the week is the best to launch your posts or which age group is the one that has the best engagement, it is safest to look through different charts of the Business Manager Facebook and Instagram. In addition, it will be complex to cross certain metrics or answer certain questions, more so if you manage multiple profiles or accounts as is the case of performance marketing agencies.

It will also not be necessary to waste too much time preparing huge amounts of data, pivot tables or fddling with heavy Excel files that over time no one knows where they are.

The idea will be to have a dashboard for our Facebook and Instagram profiles where we can consult the most relevant information, starting from a more aggregate level until we reach a higher degree of detail.

Need more reasons to set up your Facebook and Instagram dashboard?

How will I transfer my data?

Since we’re going to work our dashboard on a platform external to Facebook and Instagram, we’ll need to have the data connected in real time and permanently.

If you don’t have a technical profile on your computer that can connect the Facebook API to the viewing platform, you’ll need to resort to one of the business solutions that exist today.

There are multiple options to connect our data to our dashboard, but the alternative that we find most interesting is Supermetrics. They have a monthly license at an affordable price and with a few clicks we will have the connection made.

What platform will I create the Facebook and Instagram dashboard with?

Once we have our connector, we can talk about the visualization tool, in our case: Google Data Studio.

We really should make sure the compatibility of the platform where we’ll create our dashboard before choosing connector. But in this case it is suppliers with a high distribution and use in the market, therefore, perfectly compatible.

First, we’ll use Data Studio because it’s customizable to a high degree. It is a relatively new tool but constantly improving. The use for various data sources for more than a year and every day I learn something new and try to make the most of it, as I remarked in this post of Google Data Studio.

It’s located within Google’s suite and is easily shareable, making it easier to collaborate across teams. It also supports multiple data sources, either with direct connection for all Google products (Google Ads, Google Analytics, Search Console, YouTube Analytics, Google Sheets, BigQuery, etc.) and for databases (MySQL and PostgreSQL) or through a third-party service that connects you to the multiple digital marketing tools that exist. With a Google email account you will be able to access it, its use is free.

How do I connect my data?

Using Google Data Studio is very simple and intuitive. Simply add to our data sources the Facebook and Instagram account for which we will create the dashboard:

And associate this with a new report.

How do I create a chart?

We have the option to create the dashboard from the new data source. But we can also link the data source later, starting with a new report. Once we have this, we can start to join the different metrics and dimensions for each chart. And as we see, the types of graphics that Data Studio allows for our dashboard are quite varied.

What charts will I make?

As mentioned earlier, our Facebook and Instagram dashboard should be our starting point in our analytics and then make concrete decisions. And for them we will start from a more generic level of information and then look for a greater degree of detail.

 

Meet your audience

The first thing we have to do, if we don’t know already, is to meet our audience. In this way you can customize your content and campaigns. And we will be able to extrapolate knowledge about our potential customers.

The composition of these profiles should not vary excessively over the months, but it may be interesting to compare them when we do an analysis with a little more time perspective and compare them in case they have changed over time and try to understand the variation.

For example, it would be interesting to also compare whether the fans of our page are the same as the group that most interacts with our posts. And if that’s the case, we can enhance the content that most interests the people who interact, for example. In the same way that we could try to get the attention of fans who least interact with other types of posts.

Where’s your audience?

With our Facebook and Instagram dashboard, you can also know the location of your followers. And it will be as interesting if you have a presence in multiple countries as if the scope is more local. Thus, we will try to identify the geographical differences to customize as much as possible our content, seeking to increase the interaction of followers and, therefore, strengthen the relationship with our brand.

 

What kind of message?

This section has a rather qualitative component, so it will be necessary to analyze the publications themselves, by the type of content in question. Although within our Facebook and Instagram dashboard we can include simple graphics that give us clues about what kind of creativity is bringing us more likes, in this case.

 

What’s engagement like?

At this point the idea is to detect what the engagement of our content is like, to know if it is generated by comments, if it has many shares, if it is based more on “Like”, or is a combination of these 3 actions.

Through our Facebook and Instagram dashboard we also have to find out what kind of content generates the most engagement among followers but also which one is viral and why. In this way we can enhance those types of publications that generate better response and more visibility reports to our brand.

It will also be interesting to see in aggregate what is the best time to publish, for example, by day of the week.

How do these metrics evolve?

Above we have already seen a chart with time horizon, since, for some metrics of our dashboard, the axis of time takes on special importance.

For example, in early stages or when we are testing different types of content, it will be key to analyze how engagement evolves over time. But we will also have to take into account if we make periodic publications or based on an editorial calendar, to see monthly variations that may occur in the different metrics.

Conclusions

As we’ve seen, these charts for our Facebook and Instagram dashboard are fairly simple and will allow us to get to know our audience better. We can see aggregated data that makes it easier for us to create profiles based on gender, age, geographic location and the different types of interaction of our fans and potentials.

To get this analysis we will create a dashboard in Data Studio for our Facebook and Instagram profiles.

Based on this analysis, we will try to customize our posts and content so that there is maximum affinity with our target audience and improves the response and visibility of our brand.

Have you already created your dashboard for Facebook and Instagram? Would you include any more metrics in this type of dashboard?