Facebook Enhanced Analytics For Websites

One of the key issues within social media is measurement and the ability to track the success of a campaign or long term strategy. Because the internet is an open network and content can spread social media at the speed of light it can be tricky to keep track.

The viral spread of your content can be particularly difficult to track, but Facebook has just launched a new feature which will help brands and content producers stay on top of how and where their content is being spread thanks to Facebook users.

For example, you’ll be able to see how many impressions a Like button attracted, as well as the actual number of Likes. Information such as this will help site owners to improve their content, optimise the use of the Like button and provide an all round improved user experience.

Similarly, our friends from ViralTracker offer a tool enabling brands to track the reach and response of their online video campaigns.

The new analytics tool is called Insights for Websites and can be easily implemented on any website through a piece of basic code.

The great people over at All Facebook have been kind enough to sum up the key benefits of this new tool. You can find out more and start with the implementation by going to Facebook Insights.

The new analytics provides five enhanced features:

1. Like button analytics – Here are real-time analytics about like button performance. You can track the volume of impressions as well as actual clicks on the buttons. The service will also show the total volume of referral traffic coming from Facebook. The real-time data lets publishers check how modifications to like button placement impact overall performance instantly, rather than having to wait a day to make changes based on the results found in other analytics packages.
2. Comments box analytics – For the new comments plugin that Facebook rolled out last week, the social network is providing data about the number of on-site and in-feed impressions. While this stat provides interesting data, I’m not quite sure how a publisher would act based on the information provided.
3. Popular pages – For those who aren’t using services like Chartbeat or other real-time services, Facebook has implemented a new popular pages tool which displays the top 100 pages on a site. This enables publishers to do things such as place larger calls to action when a story is jumping in traffic. In contrast to Chartbeat, this service shows Facebook-related data (likes, comments, etc).
4. Demographics – The demographic data is similar to the existing Facebook page insights, only presented in aggregate, not on a per page basis.
5. Organic sharing – In contrast to organic search traffic, there’s also organic sharing, meaning random Facebook users forwarding your content regardless of whether there’s a like button on your site.

Hat tip – All Facebook