PageLever: The Facebook analytics app by which all others will be measured

If you’ve been using Facebook Insights to try to get an idea about what is happening with your Facebook page, you’re likely seeing some interesting results. Unfortunately, you’re also probably completely confused by what Insights is telling you.

PageLever is a Y Combinator-backed startup that is turning the world of Facebook analytics upside down. Since it requires access to your page from anyone who is a page administrator, it can pull deeper, more meaningful data and it can tell you information about that data that you’ve never seen before.

Need some proof? We’ve been running Pagelever during its stealth beta and here are some pieces of information that we’ve gathered:

• You like it when we post photos. In fact, the engagement with posts that contain photos is nearly 300% greater than when we post only text.
• Versus the previous 20 days, we’ve seen a 1000% (yes, thousand) increase in unique page views to The Next Web’s Facebook page.

In short, Pagelever can tell you fine-point details about nearly anything that you post to  your Facebook page. Have you seen some people removing their “Like” from your page? PageLever can even tell you what post likely prompted that action.

One of the most shocking, yet interesting factors to me is that PageLever can show you actual unique visitors to your page instead of impressions of your stream. Why is that shocking? Because PageLever has found that only 3-7.5% of your Facebook fans actually see what you’re posting. So if you’re seeing numbers that are above or below this, you’ll know where your page fits into the grand scale of Facebook.

Since the company hooks in via the Insights API, there’s always the chance that Facebook could remove access in the future. However, for now, founder Jeff Widman believes that Facebook has more to gain by keeping the open access in place.

When you really have the ability to dig deeply into what is happening on your Facebook page, it can completely change the way in which you use it. While Facebook’s Insights are valuable, they don’t even begin to compare to what we can gain from using PageLever. That deep, post-by-post information is what makes it worth every penny.

Speaking of those pennies, there’s a 14-day free trial for PageLever. After that, you’ll need to pick the account that serves your needs best. The company has 3 levels of accounts, from $34 to $94 per month, and it should be plenty to serve just about anyone who would come  knocking.

The company already touts a client list that includes YouTube, Microsoft, Mint.com and Gary Vaynerchuk’s Vaynermedia (among others). I’ve used quite a few tracking methods for Facebook analytics before and I can wholeheartedly tell you that I’ve yet to find one that even comes close to what PageLever is doing. If you’re serious about turning your Facebook page into something more than just a stream of noise, you owe it to yourself to give that 14-day trial a run.