About 18 months ago or so, Facebook released a product called “Facebook Analytics for Apps” – a sort of metrics based tool to show SEO style analytics for Facebook apps or at least ones that the Facebook SDK is installed upon them (including the Facebook tracking pixel).
The main premises was to measure performance in app to know what to change in terms of UX/UI and naturally see how well your app has performed financially (for example how many people shared their leaderboards on Facebook or invited people to play Candy Crush Soda in order for them to get points, thus pushing new clientele without spending a dime on advertising).
Caveat: websites that have been connected to the apps had to be measured via other tools to see how well they performed.
Not anymore!
Facebook has released a cross medium performance metrics, where you as a developer can track relevant events (e.g. proceeded to cart, shared, liked, etc) through Facebook to your website, to your app back without needing to use more than one tool to measure everything.
This feature is amazing, as it renders other tools one might use to measure success such as Google Analytics as obsolete (at least, to some extent).
Facebook has also decided to venture into the world of second hand products, with its new Marketplace – either as means to render Craigslist irrelevant or to take over chunks that were Google’s up until this point. A second hand products store, where you can see what people around you sell is naturally very profitable for possible clients, as they can research the people who sell the products more easily, but it could also serve to offer more relevant advertising to people.
Who knows, Facebook might venture into the world of mobile and offer their own operating system.
But, we are digressing.
Since Facebook has decided to offer this type of new analytics, users who don’t even have an app (but have the Facebook tracking pixel planted on their sites) can now use Facebook to get relevant insights, as well as information that could be used in CRM like fashion such as funnels, revenue and more.
Let’s go over this week’s retention rates (values taken from a case study we made):
As we can see, within a week retention rate drops from 100% to 1.75-1.8% (98.25% drop on average).
Now, this is a type of insight that doesn’t necessarily have any correlation to what’s going on Google Analytics, but does produce a very high significance level that shouldn’t be ignored on more than 500+ different events (which corresponds to normal distribution).
Let us also review another interesting metric called Events.
Events are things that trigger the Facebook tracking pixel conversion nodes, such as new page views, proceeded to cart, etc.
Let’s take a look at this week’s numbers:
As we can see, unique users are at almost a 50% value from all page views, with 2.06 pageviews per user; the new users are producing almost 90% in value, unique user wise – very good performance metric, meaning what they read was interesting enough to stay for a while (engagement is high, which is great).
Pageview and pixelinitialized are at nil value; considering the fact that Facebook has announced that this new cross medium metrics is still in Beta mode, there could be events that haven’t been populated yet in our analytics.
It is interesting to see what the future has in store, as this new tool could be used together with Google Analytics to evaluate performance on many different aspects, especially for marketers who are mostly engaged with social media (Facebook advertising, for example) and would like to see relevant metrics beyond the regular pixel data and Facebook page insights.
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