Last month, Facebook quietly announced its intention to shut down the Facebook Analytics tool starting June 30th, 2021. The end of any tool on a major web advertising platform like Facebook is likely to cause concern and anxiety for businesses, especially small and independent businesses that use these digital advertising tools as a primary part of their marketing strategies. But what does the death of Facebook Analytics mean for your business? Will it be a major loss, a minor bump in the road, or something that goes by completely unnoticed? And what do you need to do to prepare for its demise?
What is Facebook Analytics?
Facebook Analytics is a specific tool in Facebookโs advertiser toolkit that allows advertisers to track and analyze Facebook usersโ behavior across different channels by connecting data from Facebook with data off-platform from the Facebook Pixel. This means that you can, for example, see a user reacting to one of your posts and track their behavior as they move from your Facebook page to your website or other potential purchasing platforms. Facebook Analytics lets you examine how people move through your purchase funnel and filter it by demographics and more, giving you a fairly comprehensive look at your customer journey and help you identify your target audience(s).
Itโs worth mentioning that the term โFacebook analyticsโ gets thrown around a lot by marketers colloquially as they refer to any sort of data or insights that Facebook collects and makes accessible to you. However, when we talk about Facebook Analytics shutting down, this is not what we mean. Facebook Analytics (note the proper-noun capitalization) is a very specific tool used to track user behavior across Facebook and off-platform channels, and its retirement does not mean that Facebook Page and Audience Insights–which give you in-depth info about user behavior on Facebook itself–are going away. Youโll still have access to a significant amount of this analytic information, even if the formal โFacebook Analyticsโ tool fades away.
Why is Facebook Analytics going away?
The surface-level reason seems to be fairly straightforward–Facebook Analytics simply wasnโt a very popular tool. While information like Facebookโs user demographics (age, gender, etc) is great to have, most businesses or marketers that invest heavily into digital advertising were finding that 3rd-party analytics platforms were more powerful and more useful in tracking the customer or user journey. As Facebook continues to roll out its โone stop shopโ Business Manager and Business Suite tools, it seems to make sense that less-utilized, more niche tools like Facebook Analytics would be eliminated to keep Facebookโs advertiser platform simple and navigable.
However, some experts have speculated that the end of Facebook Analytics signals more than just the retiring of an unpopular platform tool. Marketers are paying close attention to the rollout of Appleโs iOS 14 mobile operating system, which includes major changes that make it much easier for app users to control or limit how much data their apps collect. While it remains to be seen exactly how much of an impact this change will end up having on data collection in the long run, many developers–including Facebook– have preemptively responded with changes in anticipation of what they predict to be a potentially seismic shift in their ability to accurately track their usersโ behaviors off-platform. Once again, off-platform data tracking is the major function of the Facebook Analytics tool, so itโs easy to see why Facebook may be retiring it if they anticipate it quickly becoming inaccurate or irrelevant.
How will the end of Facebook Analytics affect my business?
For many businesses and marketers, this will be a non-event. As mentioned above, Facebook Analytics was never quite adopted en masse by digital advertisers, and if you never touched the tool, you probably wonโt even notice that itโs gone. If you use Facebook Audience Insights or Facebook Page Insights to track on-platform user information and demographics, remember that these are separate tools and shouldnโt be affected by the Facebook Analytics retirement.ย
If you were a Facebook Analytics user, your first step should be to back up any information you have through the tool that you donโt want to see disappear. Charts and tables can be downloaded through Facebook Analytics up until June 30th, 2021 (when the tool is being retired), and you can still access reports and insights as well, so make sure you do what you need to do in order to keep that info stored off of Facebook.
While Facebook will likely be more limited in the future as to what data you can collect off-platform, the company will use the data it can collect to predict user behavior going forward. Itโs also continuing to expand the Business Manager, Business Suite, Events Manager, and Ads Manager tools to help you make the most of the data that is being collected and make sure youโre able to take advantage of the platform to the fullest extent possible.
Digital advertising platforms and the tools they provide are changing every day, and it can be hard for even dedicated marketing professionals to keep up. If youโd rather focus on building your business than tracking the minutiae of tech platform updates, Skol Marketing is here to help you utilize these tools to help you grow. If youโd prefer one-on-one guidance or would like to discuss how our assistance can help you reach your digital marketing objectives, please donโt hesitate to contact the local digital experts at Skol Marketing.
