Facebook Analytics Tools: Free Insights and Reports

Free Facebook analytics tools

The free options for a Page are the Insights in Meta Business Suite: reach, reactions, comments, shares and follower changes. Facebook analytics free of charge covers a Page you manage, and outside tools add history and exports, many for a fee.

Facebook analytics report

For a client, a Facebook analytics report should show each number and where it came from. Dripost's client reports on Pro build that page and export it to Excel, PowerPoint and PDF. Numbers a platform did not give are marked as not measured, not zero.

1. Publish the posts through Dripost

Insights measures posts Dripost published, because it holds each one’s Facebook id. Posts created directly on Facebook aren’t included.

Facebook Pages in Dripost are in live testing now: built and posting for real, open to tester accounts, and open to everyone once that test is done.

2. Open Insights

Go to Results, then Insights. Choose 7 days, 30 days, month to date or last month, and filter to Facebook when other platforms are connected.

3. What Facebook gives

For each Page post, Dripost reads reactions, comments and shares. They are summed for the period, with the change against the period before, a few hours after posts go out.

4. What it doesn’t give yet

Views and reach for Page posts need Meta’s insights permission, which is waiting on Meta’s review. Until then Dripost shows them as not measured, never as a zero that isn’t true.

5. Find the top posts

Sort the top posts by reactions or comments to see which updates the Page’s audience responded to, each with its text and date.

6. Your best time

From the posts it has measured, Insights suggests a day and hour to post, on your own clock, and says how many posts that is based on.

7. Turn numbers into next month’s plan

Shares are the Facebook number that travels furthest, since each one puts the post in front of someone else’s friends. Look at which Page posts were shared most, then plan more of the same kind in the calendar and compare the next period against this one.

How to download Facebook data: export your information to HTML or JSON

Facebook's export lives in Accounts Centre, under Your information and permissions, and you can take it as HTML to read or JSON to move to another service.

Find Export your information. Facebook's help page gives this path: your profile picture, then Settings and Privacy, then Settings, then Accounts Centre, then Your information and permissions, then Export your information and Create export.

Pick the profile and the destination. Choose your profile, then Export to device or Export to external service. With an external service you pick it and follow its authentication prompts.

Choose the format and options. HTML is the easy-to-view format: a ZIP file with an index you open in your browser, including images and videos. JSON is machine-readable and suits moving data to another service.

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