To kick things off, I’d like to thank Don Loeb of Typekit for providing some tips on how to handle the flickering text issue I mentioned in my last post. As you can probably tell, I haven’t yet implemented these suggested fixes, but I will do so in the next day or two. Also, an unrelated piece of advice…never confuse Men at Work with Men in Hats…
Now, on to the main stage…For anybody who works with web metrics, Facebook fan pages have been a bit of black hole. We haven’t had the real-time reporting or depth of information we are used to with tools like Google Analytics or WebTrends. Besides, thanks to limitation imposed by Facebook, these tools haven’t worked with Fan Pages. While there have been some third-party solutions introduced, including a new panel in WebTrends 9, and Facebook has continued to make improvements to Insights, its own internal metrics dashboard, it still feels a bit like boxing with one hand tied behind the back. I should note that even with its recent improvements, Insights is very glitchy. For example, in the past month alone it has randomly dropped days, doubled random stats for no reason, and stop reporting altogether for days at a time. Pretty flipping sweet, right?
Facebook recently introduced a new format for fan pages, I am not going to cover all the changes here. If you want to know more Ultimate Guide to the New Facebook Page Design does a pretty good job of summarizing all the crucial changes. The one change I do want to touch on is that now all content in tabs can be pulled in through iFrames…yes, they are back baby! Why does this matter? Well, now we can execute JavaScript in tabs with no limitations. Why does this matter? Well, almost all analytics tools have to execute a query through JS to report (those working in mobile analytics are aware of the problems this can pose). Why does that matter? Well, in theory we can now tag our apps and tabbed page content with our standard tracking codes and they will execute and report normally.
This isn’t a be all end all solution, and it does still leave one dependent on Facebook Insights, in all its glitchy glory, for internal referral and search data, (likes, unique visitors etc) – But it does offer a level of free, real-time reporting for Facebook tabs, apps and other content that has been unavailable until now. I am curious to get my hands on WebTrends’ new Facebook reporting and tagging tools. I don’t much care for WebTrends, but this sort of social metric integration could give them an edge on free tools like Google Analytics, which I generally think is superior to most of the paid options out there. But, given the cold war raging between Google and Facebook, I imagine it could be awhile before we see any sort of Facebook reporting in Google’s Analytics.
My Three Albums of the Week:
- Mogwai – Hardcore will Never Die, But You Will!
- Oasis – Definitely Maybe
- Jackson Browne – Late for the Sky
(I wanted to be able to put The King of Limbs on this list…but…well…just go here instead )
