Meta Insights provides valuable data and insights to help businesses understand their customers and make data-driven decisions. Accessing Meta Insights requires signing up for a Meta for Business account and connecting your business Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and/or WhatsApp accounts. Here are answers to some common questions about gaining access to Meta Insights.
What is Meta Insights?
Meta Insights is a tool provided by Meta (formerly Facebook) to give businesses insights about their marketing and ad performance across Meta’s apps. It provides metrics, reports, and visualizations to help you understand your audience, optimize your ad spend, identify trends, and make strategic business decisions.
With Meta Insights, businesses can:
- See analytics and reporting data for their Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp accounts
- Get insights about their customers and audience demographics like age, gender, location, interests, and behaviors
- View campaign performance data including reach, engagement, conversions, and return on ad spend
- Identify trends and patterns in consumer engagement and sentiment
- Optimize ad targeting and budget allocation across Meta platforms
Meta Insights pulls data from all of Meta’s platforms so businesses get a complete cross-channel view of their marketing efforts and audience insights in one centralized dashboard.
Why should I use Meta Insights?
Here are some of the key benefits of using Meta Insights for your business:
- Centralized data: Get a holistic view of your marketing data and customer insights across Meta apps in one place.
- Benchmarking: Compare your performance against competitors and industry benchmarks.
- Audience intelligence: Gain valuable demographic, geographic, behavioral and interest-based insights about your target audience.
- Ad performance: Measure and optimize your ad spend, engagement, reach and ROI across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.
- Cross-channel insights: See complete insights across your organic and paid presence on all Meta apps.
- Trend identification: Identify rising trends and opportunities to inform content and product strategy.
- Sentiment analysis: Gauge consumer perception and reactions to your brand, products or campaigns.
For any business marketing on Meta’s platforms, Meta Insights is an invaluable resource to inform your strategy and unlock growth opportunities.
What types of insights can I access in Meta Insights?
Meta Insights provides a robust set of analytics and data points across four main categories:
Audience Insights
- Demographic data (age, gender, location, language, education, relationship status etc.)
- Interests and affinity categories
- Behavioral data (device usage, purchase activity etc.)
- Custom audiences you’ve created
- Lifetime value predictions of customers
Engagement Insights
- Impressions and reach metrics
- Content engagement stats (reactions, comments, shares, saves etc.)
- Video views and watch time
- conversions
- Follower growth analysis
- Messenger and WhatsApp metrics
Ad Performance Insights
- Impressions, reach and frequency for ad sets and creatives
- Click-through-rate and cost per click
- Conversions, cost per conversion and return on ad spend
- Breakdown of results by detailed demographics, placement, device
- Optimization recommendations
Business Trends
- Growth trends and forecasts
- Metrics benchmarks vs. competitors
- Industry trend identification
- Sales/lead volume data
- Buyer journey insights
Meta is continually expanding the data surfaced through Meta Insights, so expect even more robust analytics and customization over time.
How do I connect Meta Insights to my business accounts?
To get set up with Meta Insights, you need to:
- Sign up for a Meta for Business account if you don’t already have one.
- Confirm your business email and connect your ad accounts.
- Navigate to the Meta Insights tab in Business Manager.
- Connect your Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and/or WhatsApp accounts.
- Opt into data sharing to enable insights.
Once your accounts are connected, data will start populating in Meta Insights within 24 hours. You can then explore the full suite of analytics and reporting for your business.
Connect Facebook Page
To connect your Facebook Page:
- Go to the Meta Insights tab in Business Manager.
- Click “+ Add Accounts” > “Connect Facebook Page”.
- Select the Page you want to connect.
- Click “Continue” and confirm the connection.
Connect Instagram Account
To connect your Instagram account:
- Go to the Meta Insights tab in Business Manager.
- Click “+ Add Accounts” > “Connect Instagram Account”.
- Enter the username of the Instagram account you want to connect.
- Click “Continue” and confirm the connection.
Connect Messenger
To enable Messenger insights:
- Go to the Meta Insights tab in Business Manager.
- Click “+ Add Accounts” > “Connect Messenger”.
- Toggle on the Messenger switch.
Connect WhatsApp
To enable WhatsApp insights:
- Go to the Meta Insights tab in Business Manager.
- Click “+ Add Accounts” > “Connect WhatsApp”.
- Read and accept WhatsApp’s terms and privacy policy.
- Toggle on the WhatsApp switch.
Once connected, you’ll be able to access insights for each channel from the Meta Insights dashboard.
What kind of access and permissions do I need?
To access insights for your business assets in Meta Insights, you need:
- A Facebook business account with Business Manager enabled
- Admin, analyst, or advertiser access level in Business Manager
- Ownership of or admin access to the Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, ad accounts etc. you want to analyze
- Pages and accounts must be company-owned, not personal accounts
Consult your company’s Business Manager admins if you don’t have the required access level or account permissions.
What metrics and reports can I view in Meta Insights?
Meta Insights provides pre-built dashboards, standard reports, and customizable reporting to view metrics across many categories. Some of the key reports and metrics available include:
Audience Reports
- Detailed demographics
- Interests and affinity categories
- Custom audience membership and overlap
- Follower analysis
- Customer lifetime value
Engagement Reports
- Post and story reach
- Impressions and clicks
- Reactions, comments, shares
- Saves and bookmarks
- Video views, watch time, completion rate
- Website clicks and conversions
- Messaging interactions
Ad Performance Reports
- Campaign cost, reach and frequency
- Link clicks, CTR, CPC
- Conversions, CPA, ROAS
- Results by detailed segments and placements
- Recommendations for optimizations
Business Health Reports
- Follower growth analysis
- Engagement and response rates
- Website traffic trends
- Sales volume and lead counts
- Industry benchmarking
You can segment, filter and customize these standard reports to meet your specific business needs. Meta Insights makes it easy to identify trends, compare performance periods, and share actionable analytics across your organization.
How can I customize and filter the data in Meta Insights?
Meta Insights provides robust options for customizing reports to focus on the data points most relevant to your business. You can:
- Filter by date range: Analyze specific time periods like the past month, quarter, year etc.
- Filter by attributes: Zero in on specific demographics, platforms, campaigns, content types etc.
- Add/remove metrics: Customize your reports with only the metrics you need, like video views, CTR, conversions etc.
- Compare segments: Spotlight differences between audience groups, periods, campaigns.
- Save custom reports: Rename and save filtered reports for quick access later.
- Export data: Download filtered datasets as CSV files for offline analysis.
Using these customization options, you can easily manipulate the data in Meta Insights to aggregate insights tailored to your business goals and questions.
What are some best practices for using Meta Insights effectively?
To get true value from Meta Insights for your business, keep these tips in mind:
- Align with goals: Identify 1-2 core business or campaign goals, and focus your analysis on data points that directly inform those goals.
- Be proactive: Schedule time to regularly log in, explore reports, identify trends/issues early.
- Leverage dashboards: Use Insights dashboards to monitor real-time performance at a glance.
- Create reports: Save customized reports to easily return to key metrics.
- Compare time periods: Spot trends and optimize based on how metrics differ week-over-week, month-over-month etc.
- Segment audiences: Isolate key demographics and analyze performance for each.
- Blend qualitative and quantitative data: Combine Insights metrics with customer feedback surveys, reviews etc.
- Collaborate across teams: Align on insights, identify actions, and track progress together.
- Refine regularly: Iterate on the reporting to capture metrics that best inform your decisions.
How can I share Meta Insights reports with others?
Meta Insights allows you to securely collaborate and share insights from your data. You can:
- Share dashboards: Send filtered dashboards to teammates.
- Email reports: Send standard or custom reports as emails to colleagues.
- Assign access levels: Give teammates specific access like “view only” or “edit” permissions.
- @mention colleagues: Pull in coworkers for visibility when commenting on reports.
- Export to PDF: Download and share reports as printable PDF documents.
- Export data: Export underlying data sets to share offline or with other systems.
Leverage collaboration features to share key findings, align on next steps, and ensure all stakeholders have access to the latest performance analytics.
How can I get additional support with Meta Insights?
If you need help getting set up with Meta Insights or have any questions as you use it, here are some options for support:
- Meta’s Business Help Center – Articles, guides, FAQs, and troubleshooting.
- Help Center section specifically for Meta Insights.
- One-sheeters – Short how-to tips for Insights features.
- Online courses on Meta for Business platform.
- Meta’s ad support via chat, email or phone if Insights issues are ad-related.
- Contact your Meta account representative if applicable.
Meta also continually rolls out new training resources, so check the Business Help Center often. For quick answers on using Insights, the in-product and online help centers should provide the guidance you need.
Conclusion
In summary, Meta Insights is an invaluable analytics tool that allows businesses to make data-driven decisions based on actionable insights across the full Meta ecosystem. By connecting your Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp accounts to Meta Insights and leveraging its full suite of analytics, you can better understand your customers, optimize your marketing and ads, identify opportunities, and benchmark your performance against competitors. With robust reporting capabilities and ways to collaborate across your business, Meta Insights helps consolidate your data and improve results across all of Meta’s platforms.