Facebook silently announced that Facebook Analytics will no longer be available after June 30th, 2021.
Facebook provided ample time for marketers to export their data and options for alternative tools to track activity and understand how users interact with your brand. Marketers using this tool for Facebook stats will need to shift to use other tools such as Facebook Business Suite, Ads Manager, or Events Manager for insights.
“Facebook Analytics will no longer be available after June 30, 2021. Until then, you will still be able to access reports, export charts and tables, and explore insights. To export data into a CSV file from Facebook Analytics on your desktop, click the arrow in the top-right corner of each chart or table.“
Facebook
Why is Facebook Analytics being phased out?
Facebook Analytics was launched in May 2018, enabling marketers to gain a deeper understanding of where and how people interact with their business across channels and devices with omnichannel data and reporting with a convenient mobile app, to view data on the go. So with all these capabilities of in-depth insights, why is it vanishing? Facebook has not provided a reason for its retirement but we are speculating the following:
- Could it be that it’s not widely adopted? Some of the features developed aren’t really useful. Sure, knowing the age and gender of the user is cool, but not essential. Data shows that 200 million small businesses use Facebook, however, there is no data indicated how many of them use Facebook Analytics.
- There has been a lot of chatter among marketers this week that the retirement could be due to the expected roll-out of Apple’s privacy update (iOs 14), which can potentially turn off detailed data tracking. Users will be able to decide whether they wish to be tracked by analytical tools on their phones. According to Apple, “App Tracking Transparency will require apps to get the user’s permission before tracking their data across apps or websites owned by other companies.” This can have a significant impact on Facebook Analytics performance in a negative way if rolled out.
What next?
There have been mixed responses on Facebook’s alternative offering but also with a possibility for Facebook to update features on the alternate available tools by June. You should look into transferring the data and utilizing third-party tools for metrics as well as familiarize yourself with Facebook Business Suite.
