Facebook has upgraded its Pages Insights analytics tool and added a new unit to evaluate the effectiveness of a page called ‘Premium Ad Product’.  The updates follow its recent highlights presented during the F8 conference.

Photo: Facebook

Page insights will track statistic that users will see on pages below the total number of ‘Likes.’ This option will allow brands to keep an eye on each other with the engagement metric and motivate them to make their pages more interesting for users.

‘People Talking About’ is a new metric tool to measure user-initiated activity related to a Page. It includes posting to a page’s wall, ‘liking,’ commenting, sharing a page post or content on the page, answering a question posed to fans, mentioning a page, sharing a deal or checking in at your place.

The other metrics, brands now can use include ‘Likes,’ ‘Friends of Fans’ and ‘Weekly Total Reach.’ ‘Friends of Fans’ is the actual number of friends the brand’s fans have. A weekly total reach allows to accurately assessing how many total people have posted something about the brand’s page, how many news organizations (within Facebook) have referenced it and how much viral distribution elements of the page has gotten, says Mashable.

Pages Insights will also provide brand managers with the data on specific updates. Facebook will list the last bran’s page 500 posts and count the total number of engaged users, People Talking About it and the percentage of users who commented on the post or so called ‘virality’.

The new Page Insights product will be rolled out globally in the coming weeks. For now, it’s only available in English.

The ‘Premium Ad Product’ unit is designed to promote page posts. If a brand posts a message or a video to its Facebook page and decides to promote that particular post in the form of this already posted ad, the ad unit automatically expands to show that the user’s friend has fanned/liked that brand.

Facebook’s ad revenues are expected to double this year, to more than $4 billion, according to eMarketer. But in the face of increasingly credible competition from other social services Facebook still has a lot to prove, says Forbes. For example, Twitter’s ad revenues are expected to triple this year, and Google+ is developing quickly too.

Facebook also will hold events during the Advertising Week 2011.