With 80% average open rates, and 20% click-through rates, it's no longer a secret that Facebook Messenger marketing can be a powerhouse option for digital marketers.
If you haven't tried out a Facebook Messenger chatbot for your business yet, it's time to jump in - you can build one in minutes without using any code, all you need is a chatbot builder, like MobileMonkey.
And if you have built a Messenger chatbot, kudos - you're a step ahead of your competition.
The next stage is to monitor your chatbot metrics and reports, in order to glean key insights, and improve your chatbot's performance.
To help, in this post, I've listed up eight key chatbot performance indicators that you need to pay attention to. These KPIs will help you track your results, and better understand how your Messenger chatbot is contributing to your overall marketing goals.
Read on to learn how to navigate chatbot analytics like a pro.
1. Total Contacts
Campaigns can only drive results if people are actually reading your copy and content. Take a look at your bot analytics and see how your audience growth is doing.
The ideal is steady growth, and you'll want to make changes if you see stagnation or decrease.
If you do see a decrease, look for any correlated activity, such as a change in your approach to chat blasts or sponsored messages.
2. New Contacts
When you look at contact reports, see how your contact-building campaigns (such as comment guards or click-to-Messenger ads) performed.
Ideally, you should see spikes in new contacts where these events occurred.
3. Conversions
It's not just about conversations and contacts, you also need to pay attention to conversions.
Tracking conversions is simple, especially with chatbot builders like MobileMonkey.
To track conversions, you can set up forms that capture information about potential leads through free-form text, or multiple choice questions.
Forms make it easy to capture data about leads, especially with items Facebook can automatically populate (like name, address, phone number, email address, etc.).
When reviewing your chatbot performance, look to your forms and see what data you're getting - and how useful it is.
4. Sessions
Sessions are the total number of conversations your chatbot has with Facebook users. This metric shows how active your chatbot is, and how many users engage with it.
Look for spikes in sessions to see what's working for your chatbot. For example, was there a spike in sessions when you were offering a promotion, or did they correlate with a specific comment guard?
Find the content that sparked the spikes, and then see if you can duplicate that success with similar content.
5. Chat Blast Opens and Responses
Chat blasts are the new-and-improved email blasts. On average, chat blasts see an 80% open rate and a 20% click-through rate.
In other words, they see 10x the open rate of an email, and 4x the click-through rate.
Hopefully you're taking full advantage and chat blasting your Facebook Messenger contacts. And if you are utilizing chat blasts, ensure that you also take that next step of evaluating the individual performance of those chat blasts.
Determine which chat blasts had the best open rates and response rates, in order to get a better understanding of what content your Facebook Messenger audience is most interested in, as well as what time they're most active.
For example, if there's a spike in opens well after sending, that time may be better for scheduling future campaigns.
6. Unsubscribe Rate by Drip Campaign Dialogue
You have to maintain a solid contact list to get good results from chat blasts and drip campaigns.
While gaining new contacts is important, you should also keep current contacts subscribed. A drip campaign report shows how many people unsubscribe after each message.
Enter a drip campaign to view individual read and response rates for each blast, as well as unsubscribes per drip.
If you notice certain messages leading to high unsubscribe rates, you may want to edit or remove them.
7. Block Rate
Recently, my Facebook business Page was banned from Facebook Messenger due to high block rate.
In order to avoid this, you need to check your bot's block rate in your business Page.
To find your block rate, go to your Facebook Page's Insights tab, then select "Messages" from the left-hand menu.
It has an overview of all your Messenger analytics, including total conversations, response rate, and deleted conversations.
Occasional blocks and spam reports are normal, but having a large percentage of them is a problem.
Monitor these metrics, and if you're seeing block rates that are abnormally high, tailor your campaigns and tactics to address those concerns.
8. Facebook Messages Ads Conversations Started
The Facebook Ads platform enables you to gauge the results of your Messenger ads - and the most important metric here is 'Conversations Started'.
This shows how many users engaged with your page in Messenger for the first time. It also lists how many users clicked on one of your Messenger ads to engage.
You can track the average cost for each type of engagement through metrics within the Facebook Ads platform. Simplify reports by customizing the columns in your ad reports on Ads Manager.
You can also add them to your standard view, and create a preset report that only includes Messenger-specific metrics.
After selecting the metrics relevant to you, check the "Save as preset" box and enter a name.
These are the key metrics you'll want to be tracking to optimize your Facebook Messenger chatbot efforts. The key, of course, is to ensure you're not misusing your audience trust, and turning them away by sending them too many prompts. And the only way to keep track of this is by watching your metrics.
If you're looking to use Messenger bots, you can't live without the data element.
A version of this post was first published on Inc.com.