Facebook Fan Page Marketing part 2: Facebook Analytics

In my earlier post, I described the Facebook fan page and how it can benefit a business’ online marketing. Today, I’ll discuss how to measure the effect of the Facebook ecosystem on your marketing with Facebook analytics.

Why Do Businesses Need to Measure Facebook Analytics?

Since Facebook is a good place for marketing, there must be some demand for analytics.

• Observing visitors’ interactions with your fan page will give you basic insights into the performance of your business’ Facebook fan page and other apps.
• Facebook analytics can provide much more valuable information than normal analytics, such as demographics, gender, and education level. It is important to know who your potential customers are before you run a campaign.

Why Is Measuring So Difficult?

As I mentioned before, Facebook requires that organizations use their own markup language, Facebook Markup Language (FBML), to build a custom fan page instead of standard HTML. Furthermore, Facebook doesn’t allow standard JavaScript to run on a page on load. This means that when a visitor opens a Facebook fan page, JavaScript can’t be activated if the visitor doesn’t do anything. Instead, the developers have to use Facebook’s own solution FBJS (Facebook JavaScript) if they want to include any JavaScript in their custom fan page. Whether Facebook wants to protect users’ privacy or to build their own empire, this requirement makes tracking using traditional web analytics JavaScript tags impossible.

Available Facebook Analytics Tools

The main analytics vendors have already announced their capabilities to measure social networking. The Facebook analytics war began when WebTrends first announced their Facebook analytics capability. A few days later, Omniture and Coremetrics unveiled their own. Meanwhile, Facebook provide their own free analytics service, Facebook Insights.

• WebTrends was the first company that announced their Facebook analytics capability from the three main vendors.  They use an innovative method which uses a data call to pass parameters from the data collection API to capture all of the typical data as well as tracking flash, pop ups, email signups and other custom fields.
• The partnership between Adobe-owned Omniture and Facebook has enabled marketers to buy the capability to measure Facebook media through Omniture’s search campaign management platform. Ominiture has also developed a FBJS measurement library that allows them to track behavior data natively within Facebook.
• Social network analytics as well as mobile analytics are highlighted as one of the key new features by Coremetrics whenever they promote their new product ‘Analytics 2010’. This allows users to see how interaction with specific tabs leads to web site engagement and conversion. However, Coremetrics hasn’t dedicated any focus to reporting user interactions within Facebook.
• Facebook Insights is a free analytics tool provided by Facebook. It offers an aggregate view of fans’ interactions and demographic information across the custom fan pages and apps. Earlier this month, Facebook announced a new enhanced version which will show data for both fully-integrated sites and sites that use Facebook’s social plug-ins. In other words, now you can view the specific story that people ‘liked’ on your site or how many people commented on posts on your Facebook fan page.

Can I Just Use Google Analytics?

Finally, it is time to turn to our favourite analytics program – Google Analytics. Google hasn’t officially announced their capability to measure Facebook analytics. However, many intelligent GA fans are working on it and trying to figure out how to enable Google Analytics on Facebook. There is an open source tool called FBGAT (Facebook Google Analytics Tracker) hosted by Webdigi which allows users to generate a Google Analytics tracking code for Facebook fan pages and paste it into Facebook custom tabs. The online version of the tracking code generator can be found here. After pasting the code on the FBML page, your results will appear in the Google Analytics content report in the next 24 hours. You can find more information about the Google Analytics for Facebook project at Facebook’s Developer Wiki Page.