Facebook Analytics

Using Data To Improve Your Marketing and Build People-First Mobile Apps

Today we're releasing Facebook Analytics for Apps, a free tool that brings the power of Facebook demographics to cross-device analysis and measurement. It's designed to help developers and marketers understand their app's audience, measure how people use their app, and grow their businesses by running better ads.

Apps that are logging App Events, which includes more than 87 percent of top-grossing apps in the U.S., can start using Facebook Analytics for Apps today. Here are some of the features it includes:

Cross-Device People now use multiple devices to interact with businesses across apps and websites, and Facebook Analytics for Apps can help developers and marketers understand their traffic across these devices, which in turn can help them improve performance.

• Example: if you're an online clothing retailer and have both a native mobile app and a website, you can tell if your customers click an ad for your app on their phone, browse a pair of jeans on their laptop, and finally make a purchase on their tablet. You might discover that the majority of purchases happen on your website, but the majority of those people previously clicked ads that came from mobile, which could help you decide where to run more ads.

Segments You can look at segments, or groups of people who have certain characteristics, like women or people using Android phones. You can then look at metrics for these groups to see how they use your app differently than the overall population.

• Example: You could build a segment of the top five percent of people who make the most purchases in your app and look at their demographic and device breakdown. For instance, you might discover that people who make the most purchases are women between 25-34 who use Android. You could then decide to invest more in your Android app, or run more ads for women in that age group.

Cohorts You can now also look at cohorts, or groups of people who took a set of actions in your app. Then you can review specific metrics for that group, like what percentage of them launched your app, completed a registration, or made a purchase.

• Example: You could build a cohort of everyone who installed your app in a specific country, like France, and you might discover that those people ultimately made more purchases, both on mobile and web. Using this insight, you could choose to invest more in mobile app ads in France.

Funnels Creating funnels lets you look at how people move through a series of steps in your app, like a purchase flow. This can help you see where people drop off, which can help you figure out where to devote resources to improving performance.

• Example: If you're a game developer and your game is only available in Spanish, you might want to know if translating your game into other languages would result in more purchases. You can build a funnel for your purchase flow, and then look at that funnel broken down by language. If non-Spanish speakers are dropping off at the purchase point more often, you might be able to increase your revenue by localizing your app into additional languages.

Improving your advertising: Facebook Analytics for Apps can help developers understand and improve the ads they're already running, and figure out how to run better ads in the future. Analytics helps you measure the lifetime value of your Facebook ads, and re-engage people who have dropped off using re-marketing.

• Example: You could measure the lifetime value of customers acquired through different ad campaigns on different ad networks that you ran in Japan, which could help you in the future determine how much you are willing to bid per install in Japan for each ad network.

Also, we know marketers advertise on more channels than just Facebook, so over time we can help you measure the performance of your mobile app ads on other ad networks. This attribution feature is launching today as part of Facebook Analytics for Apps in closed beta, and it enables advertisers to measure the performance of their mobile app ads for install across networks, all from a single dashboard. To sign up for more information, please go here.

Getting Started

To help make it easy for you to start using Facebook Analytics for Apps, we have updated our developer docs that explain how to integrate App Events and created a new Analytics help center with FAQs to help you learn more.

If you're logging App Events, you can use Facebook Analytics for Apps right now. If you haven’t yet integrated App Events, we’ve built a demo app to help you get started.