Facebook Tuesday rolled out updated analytics tools for third-party sites, using social plug-ins such as the Like
button and widgets for posting comments and recommendations. The upgraded version of Facebook Insights promises to provide up-to-the-minute analytics for quick optimization and expanded tracking,
including impressions, referral clicks and most popular pages.
The new system will also report demographic data for interactions based on aggregate anonymized data. For example, an
e-commerce site could determine whether products are generating the highest levels of interaction from a specific demographic and alter future product decisions based on that data, according to
Facebook.
Since Facebook introduced social plug-ins last April, more than 2.5 million publishers have added them to help increase engagement on their sites by linking user interactions back to
the social network, which has more than 600 million users worldwide.
The Like button, for sharing content with Facebook friends, has become the most pervasive plug-in. With the revamped Insights
tool, publishers can now see in real-time how many times people view or clicked Like buttons or Like stories on Facebook, or clicked Like stories to visit the originating site.
Similarly, site
owners can see the number of times that people saw comments boxes or left comments, saw comments back on Facebook, and clicked to see site content. Facebook has also expanded the Popular Pages tools
to show the top 100 pages that people like, comment on, and share material.
Facebook noted that even sites that have not added plug-ins can use its analytics software to track how people are
sharing links to their sites in status updates and Wall posts. The new metrics overall will also be available through the Graph API (application programming interface) and can be exported at any time.
Since many of the metrics are new, 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," stated a Facebook blog post today.