Cross-Platform Analytics (Beta)

Originally posted on the Facebook Analytics for Apps blog

Facebook knows growth, which is why we built Analytics for Apps—to help businesses grow by understanding their customers, using the same tools and techniques we use. Since launching at F8 in 2015, over 800,000 unique apps have used the service. It's completely free and you don't need to use Facebook Login or any other Facebook product to get rich insights.

New Features in Analytics for Apps

Analytics for Apps is introducing a beta that adds support for web measurement and cross-platform metrics. At Facebook, we believe in thinking about people, not devices and we know that in the course of completing a task, people are highly likely to switch between multiple platforms and devices. In fact, 53% of people who own two devices switch between them to complete tasks or activities, and 77% of people who have three or more devices do the same.

With Analytics for Apps, you can now get a complete picture of customer behavior across your native mobile apps, desktop web and mobile web presences — all in one seamless analytics experience.

We're also launching other new features to help you better understand and engage with your audience:

• User properties allow you to integrate online and offline information about your customers
• Sharing insights now includes a way to predict whether your content is about to go viral

Web measurement and cross-platform metrics (beta): all your analytics in one place

We've made it as easy as possible for businesses to view cross-platform metrics for their websites and apps. Millions of businesses already embed our JavaScript SDK for Facebook Login, sharing and more, and we're excited to extend this SDK to support Facebook App Events. These app events are identical to those you use in your native mobile app, providing a seamless cross-platform measurement experience. You'll be able to grow your business by having a unified view of all of the activity across your app and website.

We also know that millions of businesses already use the Facebook pixel to create audiences and measure the effectiveness of their web advertising campaigns. Facebook pixel customers will now automatically get insights in Analytics for Apps without the need to change their existing pixel implementation. Just visit your analytics dashboard and select your Facebook pixel from the drop-down. Today, we'll only show Facebook pixel data going forward, but we plan to backfill your historical data soon.

Businesses using the Facebook pixel that want to combine their web and app data to view cross-platform analytics can use event source groups, which we're also launching today. An event source group allows you to pull together data from multiple sources, such as a Facebook pixel and one or more mobile apps. This gives you a unified view of your customer activity across all of these sources, all in one place. For more information, see Using Pixels and Event Source Groups in Analytics for Apps.

User properties (beta): your customer data, Facebook's demographics

We're also adding a new feature called user properties that lets you integrate online and offline customer data, including information from your customer relationship management (CRM) system and profile data from your mobile app. This allows you to filter your reports based on the key segments of information that are important to you.

For instance, once you integrate your CRM data, you'll be able to filter customer activity based on the characteristics of people who have a certain status in your system, such as those people who are in your “gold-tier” loyalty program or for people who were acquired via different ad networks to understand the lifetime value of your acquisition strategy. Learn more about user properties in our docs.

Sharing insights: a new way to measure your content going viral

In addition to helping you better understand activity on your website and app, we've updated sharing insights, which shows you trends and demographics about how content from your website is being shared on Facebook. We've added a measure of virality: how frequently a recent link from your website is shared on Facebook, and we're making it available to all apps that have implemented sharing insights.

This allows you to see when your content is becoming popular on Facebook based on all articles published in the last 10 hours and which URLs have been shared the most in the last 5 hours. You can use this data to create strategies to make your website content even more popular, or create similar content in the future.

Additionally, you can now create a Custom Audience from people who have shared specific content from your website on Facebook. Just click the Create Custom Audience button in sharing insights to get started. Learn more about Custom Audiences.

It's easy to get started!

See our quickstart guide to get web measurement for cross-platform analytics using the JavaScript SDK. Once you implement, your web app event data will be available to you in Analytics for Apps.

Facebook Pixel users will be able to access their analytics immediately by going to the analytics dashboard.

Set up sharing insights for your website to get data on how people are sharing your content on Facebook, including our new viral measurements.