What is the Private Conversations Table?
The Private Conversations Table is a Facebook metric available for pages you connect with Insights. It allows you to view the message and create time of all the private conversations created in the selected timeframe, along with the first reply, total number of replies and response time. It also includes conversations that were started by the page by privately replying to a user’s comment on one of the page’s posts.
Selecting the proper insights connection
When you connect a Facebook page with Insights in Facelift Data Studio, you have 2 options: just the basic access, or also analyzing the page’s inbox. You must select the inbox option in order to use the Private Conversations Table. If you only connect with basic access, the Private Conversations Table will not work.
Distinguishing between new conversations with the same user
When viewing your page’s private messages on Facebook, you will see that there is 1 conversation per user. However, 1 user could have had multiple conversations with the page over time. For this reason, we have a method of distinguishing between separate conversations a user has with the page.
This is done by looking at the create time of each message. If a user sends a private message more than 3 weeks after the last message (whether the last message was from the page or the user), then this is counted as a new conversation. Also, any conversation that is started by the page privately replying to a user’s public comment will always be counted as a new conversation.
It is important to note that if a user sends a message and then the page takes more than 3 weeks to reply, this is not then counted as a new conversation - it is simply seen as a long response time.
Response time
The response time is the time difference between the creation time of the message and the first reply by the page owner to this message.
If the page started the conversation by privately replying to a user's comment on one of the page's posts, no response time will be calculated as the create time of the comment is unavailable.
Ignoring Facebook auto-responder when analysing
It is possible to set up an autoresponder for your private message inbox on Facebook, however, you might want to analyse your live replies only and ignore this auto response time. This is possible by using a different data source from the Facelift Data Studio API. If you wish to alter any of your private inbox metrics to use the response time after the auto-response, just get in touch with our support team and we'll make the changes for you.
Key takeaways
This data is only available with a Facebook Insights connection
User messages created more than 3 weeks since the last message are considered new conversations
Response Time cannot be calculated for conversations started by the page when privately replying to a user’s comment
It is important to communicate that connecting your pages to private level statistics in our tool does not give us access to any of your login details or privacy settings. You can find out more about this topic here.