Improved Analytics for Websites, Applications, and Pages
Having good analytics is a key to successfully growing a business. To provide you with even better metrics for your Facebook applications, websites, and Pages, we recently launched an improved Insights dashboard.
The new Insights dashboard is your single source for all your Facebook analytics needs for:
- Websites: Fully-integrated sites and those that use social plugins, or add a non-integrated domain in one easy step
- Applications: Including canvas, mobile, device, and desktop applications
- Facebook Pages: Including Pages created on Facebook.com and those that are part of the Open Graph protocol
For example, you can now view analytics around specific stories liked on your website, or how many users commented on posts made on your Page (note that this is anonymized aggregate data and does not include personally identifiable information). From there, you will have a better idea of what your audience finds most interesting and capitalize on that content.
The Insights dashboard contains more data than before, as well as a host of new visualization tools, including the ability to view full screen, print, and save graphs. We've also released a new demographics visualization so you can get more information about the audience interacting with your application, Page, or website.
As a domain administrator, you can now access sharing metrics and demographic information per domain and per URL so you can optimize your content for sharing and better tailor your content to your audience. To get started, you will need to associate your domain with a user ID or a Facebook application or Facebook Page that you administer. You can do this by clicking the green "Insights for your Domain" button on the Insights dashboard and adding the meta tag that is generated to the <head> section of the root page on your domain. If your site utilizes subdomains, the root file of each subdomain must be claimed separately.
For application administrators, Insights now includes feedback for stream stories, referral traffic to your application, a breakdown of what user actions contribute to active user count, demographics on authorized users and active users, and the number of times permissions are prompted and granted.
If you administer a Facebook Page or have integrated the Open Graph protocol into your Web pages, you can now see analytics for referral traffic and stream stories in the Insights dashboard, as well as tab views for your Page. Insights will capture engagement with Pages regardless of whether an action was taken on or off Facebook.
Accessing Analytics Programmatically
In the coming days, we'll discuss the ways in which you can get even more analytics, and in a programmatic way. Until then, we'd love to hear your feedback on the Developer Forum.
Alex, an engineer on the Platform team, enjoys having better insight.
