Analytics in a Platform World

June 14th, 2007

By Justin Smith

There was a lot of buzz in the tech world yesterday about comScore’s announcement of a widget tracking service called “Widget Metrix”. Basically, comScore is now able to tell advertisers and publishers how much distribution widgets are getting in terms of unique viewers.

This is valuable data. But basic widget analytics don’t offer adequate insight to understand what’s happening inside Facebook right now. Because it is such a new paradigm of application use, the Facebook Platform offers new challenges for measuring engagement for advertisers, publishers, and investors.

Some new questions raised by Facebook Platform applications are:

How valuable is a Facebook widget view (in Facebook, profiles/widgets can only usually be viewed by friends and network members) vs. a blog or MySpace widget view (where profiles/widgets can usually be viewed by anyone)?
How valuable is Facebook canvas real estate vs. Facebook profile real estate? vs MySpace profile real estate? vs real estate on your own website?
How much attention are users giving to applications vs. Facebook? What is the value of a Facebook member who has “added” your application vs. the value of a registered user on your own website?

I believe that ultimately these answers will vary greatly by application. Applications that are highly engaging for users and that offer significant new value to friends should be valued differently than applications with similar reach but significantly weaker engagement patterns. I suspect it will be a while before analytics services will be able to offer this level of insight within the Facebook Platform.

[tags]facebook,analytics,platform,attention,widgets[/tags]

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3 Responses to “Analytics in a Platform World”

Andy Hill Says:
June 14th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Analytics are what will make a lot of developers use the approach of embedding your application in an IFRAME instead of using FBML.

Embedding web analytics packages like Google Analytics would be easy with an iframe, and impossible with the FBML approach.
Justin Smith Says:
June 14th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Good point Andy. I’m interested to see if Facebook will provide any analytics tools to application creators to accommodate for the imposed limitations of FBML.
Inside Facebook » VC Perspectives on Facebook Platform: Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew Says:
June 17th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
[...] self, but about the Platform and its implications for venture funded consumer Internet businesses. Is a Facebook app the same as a website or a widget? Is a Facebook user the same as a regular user? Will Facebook threaten application [...]