Attention all marketers, social media managers and those that work with social media analytics! As you’ve probably already heard, Facebook has decided to shut down Facebook Analytics; the tool that we use to track likes and followers as well as page views and post views plus monitor the interaction of the audience with our business pages on Facebook. This is not a drill – from 30 June 2021, you’ll no longer have access to this feature that helps you get the most from the social media network that claims to reach a whopping 1.62 billion users every day.

If you’re wondering what inspired the change, a popular theory is the Apple iOS update 14 privacy update, which comes with new settings that allow users to choose what Facebook can track outside of its own app. In other words, iOS users will be asked for their permission for Facebook to gather their behavioral data across other apps and sites. With the European Union still focused on privacy issues, Facebook can get into legal trouble for tracking cookies and online behaviours – even of people who don’t use the social network. According to other reports, Analytics is simply not as useful as other analytics tools such as Amplitude or Mixpanel. When you take these points into consideration, it’s not all that surprising why Facebook Analytics is going away. They’re wanting to keep things simple.

So, what’s all the fuss about then? Luckily for those who use Analytics to create reports, or to learn something interesting about how your audience behaves, there’s no need to panic. Once Analytics is no longer, you’ll still be able to use Facebook Ads Manager, Events Manager and Business Suite to track audience, engagement, content and metrics as before. In comparison to Business Manager, which is primarily used to control your business features, Business Suite is a relatively new feature that allows you to see detailed Facebook and Instagram insights, schedule posts, create ads and respond to messages. As it’s more focused on communication, this is an important tool especially for community managers. The other good news is that you don’t have to worry about losing all your data (hooray!).

Beyond Facebook’s alternatives to Analytics, there are several third-party products that you can use to track performances. Two popular options are Mixpanel, which tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications and provides tools for targeted communication with them, and Sotrender – all you need to do is connect this analytics and reporting product to your Facebook pages and it will start saving historical data on its own. Note that both of these products can take some getting used to! If you have anything interesting to add about Analytics going away, get social with us on Twitter @red_lifestyle.