Facebook launches real-time analytics integrated with your site

Facebook Insights for domains feature now lets you tag your site to show interactions of Facebook users with your site

We know how important social plugins are now (specifically the Facebook social plugins such as the 'Likes' and 'Comments'). Their usage is constantly increasing with over 2.5m web sites now using them since early 2010, and with 600m consumers in Facebook, it represents a huge source for creating awareness about your brand and traffic to your site. This week Facebook just made visualising, monitoring and managing that a whole lot easier with an upgrade to Insights for Facebook - see this post from the developer blog for an explanation of the analytics and how to set it up. We've done this and it's relatively easy - just adding a Facebook specific meta tag to the header of your home page.

Insights (Facebook's analytics tool) isn't new, it's just been a little limited until now, this update lifts the lid so you can really see what's working in content terms and make better use of the plugins that you may or may not have dotted around your web site. Going forwards, you can demonstrate the attributable value of those plugins to your web site.

Show me the... traffic

The usage of Facebook social plugins (i.e 'Likes') are demonstrations of engagement and interest at the content and brand level, yet ultimately you want that engagement to manifest itself in a steady stream of traffic to your web site from Facebook, right? We'd suggest that's the most obvious way to see what Facebook interactions actually does for you at the commercial level, so understanding how that traffic is created is paramount to optimising it.

What can Facebook Insights reveal?

The short answer is that Insights offers anonymous analytics on how people interact with your content and to help you optimise both your website and your content, in real-time. Here's an example:

Facebook Insights for Likes

So what insights can you gain:

• Monitor organic sharing. Insights is really designed for websites that use Facebook social plugins, yet even those that haven't yet implemented plugins can see how people are sharing links to your site in Facebook status updates and Wall posts. After you claim access “Insights for your Domain” allows admins of websites that aren’t integrated into the Open Graph to receive analytics about organic sharing of their content on Facebook.
• Like button analytics. Marketers can access data to optimise Like buttons, across your site and on Facebook (remember people mostly like content, it's not just about where the button is!). You can visualise how many times people saw Like buttons, clicked them, saw those Liked stories on Facebook, and clicked on the Liked stories to visit your website. Nice!
• Comments box analytics. I posted last week about the new Facebook comments box and as per the Like button, Facebook visualise the number of times people have seen Comments Boxes, left comments, seen the commented stories on Facebook, and clicked those stories to see the content on your site.
• View popular Pages. Simple and powerful - Facebook now allow you to see the top 100 pages that people are liking, commenting on, and sharing. This granularity should help identify opportunities for developing more engaging content.
• Learn about demographics. Facebook provide aggregated (anonymous) data to enable the tailoring of content and products to users. Through demographic information for those interactions (both on your site and on Facebook). You can see a table displaying gender, age range, country, and language. Note: Facebook count data on a per-interaction and not per-user basis.

So, what?

• You'll have actionable data to optimise what social plugins are integrated and where on your web site to drive more traffic
• You can try and test plugins, maybe previously you couldn't justify the effort
• Since it's real-time, your ability to see what content is resonating with your audience won't have any hold-ups
• You learn what content works for what demographics
• Use it to demonstrate to a wider team how and why Facebook is important (assuming it is for you, of course), it provides a stepping stone to Open Graph integration too

One thing to note for existing Insights users: The Facebook Developers Blog comments that "Many of the metrics included in this version of Insights are new, so historical data is not available. We will continue to provide access to the old Insights for the next two months, but we encourage you to export your data for future reference". So if you want access the old - export it quickly!

We certainly expect that the updated Insights will see more marketers start trying social plugins for their brands. What do you think?