If you administer a Facebook Page, Facebook Insights provides an abundance of useful metrics. There is one crucial metric that is not visible in the basic Facebook page analytics Insights dashboard: Shares of your web site’s contents that originate not from your Facebook Page, but from your site itself.

The good news is that you can track those shares with Facebook’s Insights for Your Domain. Follow theses simple steps:

Step 1: Go to the Facebook Insights Dashboard. Go to http://www.facebook.com/insights/

Step 2: Get the Insights for Your Domain Meta Tag. Click the green “Insights for Your Domain” button in the upper-right of the dashboard. In the dialog box, enter the domain of your web site. Then use the “Link with:” drop down to choose the Facebook Page associated with that web site.

Highlight and copy the entire meta tag displayed in the dialog box. Leave the dialog box open so you can come back and confirm the code installation after the next step.


Step 3: Install Meta Tag on Your Site. Access the HTML code for your site’s root page, and paste the copied meta tag in between the <head> and </head> tags. Upload the edited page to your site’s server.  (In reality, there will be a lot more code in your header section than shown in the example below. If you are unfamiliar with editing HTML, see your site’s webmaster.)


Step 4: Confirm the Tag is Working. Go back to the dialog box on the Facebook Insights Dashboard and click the “Check Domain” button.


Verification of the meta tag installation may take some time, so be patient. In some cases, if you are not the admin who set up the page originally, your request to claim the domain may be denied. In that instance you will need to have the original admin follow the steps above (or use their login).

If your tag is successfully verified, sharing data should begin to be available after about 24 hours. Now you can track Facebook shares with relative ease!

One more thing: You don’t access the Insights for Domain stats from your Page’s own Insights dashboard. You will check your share statistics at http://www.facebook.com/insights/ , where a new “Domains” section will appear.