Looking Beyond the Like: Facebook Insights
During Facebook’s f8 developer conference, the media coverage largely focused on the universal “like” feature and privacy concerns, all while a range of other features were rolled out by Facebook. The following post will be one in a series that will look more closely at other Facebook features that may not be in the "like limelight," but they still have an impact on engagement both within and outside of Facebook.
At f8, Facebook rolled out a new and improved dashboard for Insights, its metrics platform that provides analytics for pages, applications, and websites that implement Facebook’s new social plugins.
The new dashboard is available to page administrators and application developers at http://facebook.com/insights. The old Insights dashboard is still available to page administrators through the page interface. I’ll touch briefly on some of the highlights, but page administrators should take some time for a deep dive into the new dashboard.
Snapshots of the new Insights Dashboard
While the web analytics space is more mature and established, social analytics are evolving as rapidly as the networks they measure. Overall, Insights is now to Facebook measurement, what Google Analytics and Overture have been for tracking website traffic.
For pages, the new Insights dashboard focuses on interactions and fans. This is similar to the old version of Insights, but it now features improved graphs, full-screen display options, and new metrics such as tab views, fan sources, and external referrals to your page. Data like this will help answer common questions about what fans are looking at, where they first “like” your page, and whether people are visiting your page from outside of Facebook.com.
Per-post analytics are now displayed in a “Most Recent Posts” table that can be sorted by date, number of impressions and feedback rate. At this time, per-post stats are only displayed for authenticated pages with over 10,000 fans.
Another new feature of the Insights dashboard called “Insights for Your Domain” provides an additional perspective on website traffic. Websites that deploy social plugins can track the demographic data of those Facebook members who interact with the plugins. This demographic overlay of age, gender, location and language on website traffic is one of the initial glimpses into the value of Facebook’s Open Graph. Additionally, Insights provides reports at the overall website level and even for specific URLs on website content sharing metrics such as daily shares, feedback rate, and reshare rate.
Now that this new version of Insights is available to the public, engagement on and off Facebook can be more deeply tracked, analyzed, and optimized. Facebook page administrators have an increasingly critical job as their organizations and brands become better “liked.” Thanks to Insights they can do it much better.
