14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is introducing an improved analytics tool with the new Insights dashboard. The tool is aimed at Facebook Page owners and platform Applications, but also at regular websites. The new Insights dashboard comes with better demographic analytics and more information on sharing activity, but the real party piece is the ‘Likes’ data, aggregated from all over the web.
“To provide you with even better metrics for your Facebook applications, websites, and Pages, we recently launched an improved Insights dashboard.The new Insights dashboard is your single source for all your Facebook analytics needs for: Websites - Fully-integrated sites and those that use social plugins, or add a non-integrated domain in one easy step; Applications - Including canvas, mobile, device, and desktop applications; Facebook Pages - Including Pages created on Facebook.com and those that are part of the Open Graph protocol,” Alex Himel, a Platform engineer at Facebook, announced.
The focus is on the user sharing activity on Facebook and now even off-site. The aggregated view should give Insights users a better perspective on their audience including how a particular entry or app is spreading and with what groups.
If you’ve implemented one of the new social plugins, notably the Like button, you can see how many people liked a particular story on any given day and possibly spot a trend. There are new visualisation tools as well, to enable users to make sense of all the new data now available. Users can view the graphs in full-screen mode and even save or print them.
If you want to get metrics for your own website, you have to associate it with a Facebook ID, or application or Page. To do this, you must first prove you are the administrator of that domain by adding a snippet of code, a meta tag, to the <head> section of the root page. You must do this for every subdomain as well. The new Facebook Insights is now live for everyone to check it out.
