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New Facebook application analytics tools emerging
March 9th, 2008
Any web company will tell you that measuring and analyzing user behavior is vital to the constant improvement of any site. While Google and others have spent lots of time and energy building analytics infrastructure services for the general web, specialized analytics services for the Facebook Platform are still in their infancy.
Because of the nature of social network application development, app analytics is inherently a fragmented problem: because only part of users’ interaction with your software occurs in places that you can measure, application developers must depend on the platform for visibility into channels the platform owns (on Facebook, this means the News Feed, invitations, notifications, and others).
Although it did not provide developers with very much information at all for the first few months of the Platform’s launch, Facebook has been slowly but steadily adding more metrics to the Developer dashboard, including total invitation and notification conversion rates recently (though they still don’t provide News Feed impression stats). The rest is left to the developer.
Most developers will want to build their own analytics systems that gather user behavior data. From there, the specific tables and reports you build and KPIs you optimize for depend on your particular business strategy.
However, an increasing number of third party tools are aiming to help developers understand what their users are doing:
At the highest level, Appsaholic 2.0 (by SocialMedia) and Adonomics provide developers with historical graphs of daily active user counts provided by Facebook. (Note: SocialMedia is a sponsor of this blog.) Now that SocialMedia has deprecated Appsaholic 1.0, Adonomics is also the easiest place to track the top Facebook application developers.
Developer Analytics is a new service created by recent Berkeley and UPenn grads Charles Yong, Richard Chen, and Jing Chen that tracks top applications and provides predictive demographics and application overlap/affinity information in the “Advanced Statistics” of each application’s stats page. Watch for new more robust services coming from Developer Analytics in the near future.
Sometrics is a new service started by Ian Swanson, Matt Gray, and Joe Hsieh in Los Angeles. Sometrics provides app developers with a light tracking code that records traffic, demographic, and conversion data, and appears to be the first firm to track traditional web analytics and social-network-specific metrics.
As more developer analytics tools become available, we’ll let you know. If you’re using any that we didn’t cover, please drop us a line.
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March 10th, 2008 at 3:03 am
[...] number of third party tools are aiming to help developers understand what their users are doing.Read the full article here for a quick analysis about what tools there are out there. Subscribe To Our RSS [...]
March 13th, 2008 at 11:50 am
[...] also managed to receive some press over the weekend:From Inside Facebook - http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/03/09/new-facebook-application-analytics-tools-emerging/From Facebook Effect - http://facebookeffect.com/?postid=10000175We’re really proud of our [...]
March 15th, 2008 at 4:12 am
[...] De nouveaux outils pour mesurer le succes des appli Facebook: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/03/09/ [...]
March 18th, 2008 at 7:35 am
[...] New Facebook application analytics tools… Facebook Marketing and Development Any web company will tell you that measuring and analyzing user behavior is vital to the constant improvement of any site. While Google and others have spent [...]
May 14th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
[...] The basic service is free. For more information: AllFacebook wrote about Somemetrics at launch, and InsideFacebook compared them to social application analytics [...]
May 14th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
[...] Sometricsは、ソーシャルネットワーク・アプリケーションの開発者向けにメトリクス（Google Analyticsの様な物だと考えて欲しい）を提供している。Facebook向けのアプリケーションを製作中？もしそうなら、Sometricsが「ページへの訪問者数」、「ユニークビジター数」、「インストール、及びアンインストール数」、「利用者の年齢層」、「性別」、「Facebookに登録している友達の数」、「ユーザの所在地」等を教えてくるだろう。基本のサービスは無料だ。さらに詳しい話は、AllFacebookがSomemetricsの立ち上げについて書いており、InsideFacebook はSomemetricsのサービスと競合するソーシャルネットワーク向けのアナリスティックサービスの提供企業を、同社と比較している。500人の開発者が、Somemetricsのサービスをベータ期間中の現在使用している。 [...]
May 15th, 2008 at 9:20 am
[...] The basic service is free. For more information: AllFacebook wrote about Somemetrics at launch, and InsideFacebook compared them to competing social application analytics providers. Currently, 500 developers are [...]
May 20th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Refresh Analytics has just launched; http://www.RefreshAnalytics.com
Refresh Analytics has been designed to help applications developers learn more about their users and how they interact with their application.
Monitor how your application’s user demographics has changed. Track their location, age, gender, political and religious views, martial status, education, and number of friends.
Refresh Analytics is 100% free to application developers.
May 26th, 2008 at 6:23 am
basic service is free
May 1st, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Hey Justin, wanna do an update of this posting and included Kontagent Facebook Analytics (www.kontagent.com)? =)