• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, March 25, 2015

Along with a complete reimagining of its Messenger service, Facebook on Wednesday introduced a new Analytics for Apps service.

“It’s designed to help developers and marketers understand their app’s audience, measure how people use their app, and grow their businesses by running better ads,” Avdin Ghjar, a product manager at Facebook, explains in a new blog post.

Apps that log App Events -- which include more than 87% of top-grossing apps in the U.S. -- can start using Facebook Analytics for Apps immediately, Ghjar said.

Among other benefits, the new service should help developers and marketers to better understand their traffic across various devices. For example, if an online clothing retailer has both a native mobile app and a Web site, they can now tell if, say, a customer clicks an ad for their app on their phone, browses for a pair of jeans on their laptop, and then makes a purchase on their tablet.

App owners can also now look at segments, or groups of people who have certain characteristics, like women or people using Android phones. They can then look at metrics for these groups to see how they use your app differently than the overall population.

In addition, app owners can also look at cohorts, or groups of people who took a set of actions in your app. Then they can review specific metrics for that group, like what percentage of them launched your app, completed a registration, or made a purchase.

The announcement was just one that came out of Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference, on Wednesday.

The social giant also said it was turning its Messenger service into a platform for developers to directly distribute their apps to its roughly 600 million users.

Over the past five year, Facebook has paid more than $8 billion to developers, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told F8 attendees on Wednesday.