Facebook Beefs Up Analytics for Apps

The social network introduced Analytics for Apps at its F8 global developers’ conference in March 2015.

Product manager Josh Twist said in a blog post that the features being added to Analytics for Apps are people insights, push notifications, in-application notifications, sharing insights, breakdowns, improved event trends and an app events export application-programming interface, and he provided further details on all of the new features:

People insights is a new section that provides rich, aggregated and anonymized demographic information for the people using your app without requiring you to implement Facebook Login. With more than 1.5 billion people on Facebook, you’ll be able to see powerful audience insights that you can’t get anywhere else including page likes, education, device usage, purchase preferences and much more.

Push and in-app notifications (beta) help you reach your customers and automate your marketing campaigns with targeted messages. In addition to regular push notifications that deep-link to a specific place in your app, in-app notifications give you the option to create and customize richer push experiences with photos and animated GIFs. We’ve open-sourced in-app notifications to make them fully customizable and extensible.

Sharing insights (pictured above) help you see the most popular stories shared from your website to Facebook and the aggregated demographics of the people who shared them, as well as a sentiment analysis, top quotes and other insights.

Breakdowns let you pivot your data across multiple dimensions including age, gender, platform, country, language, app version and more. They’re a great way to explore your data and answer questions like, “How much of my revenue is coming from a particular platform-operating system combination in a particular country?”

Improved event trends help you better understand the demographics and behavior of your audience over time. For example, you can filter revenue trends based on a segment of people using older Android devices to decide whether you should continue supporting older devices.

The app events export API allows you to debug events and analyze your analytics data offline, allowing you access up to the last 30 days’ worth of your events.

Developers: What are your thoughts on the new additions to Analytics for Apps?