Everybody knows that Facebook is eating the world (wide web, anyway): FB now has over 750 million users and reaches 43% of all Internet users. As more and more people spend more and more of their time on FB, however, it means they’re spending less and less time on your website – and that means you can’t track how they’re interacting with your brand.
Traditionally, marketers have used on-page analytics provided by, e.g., Google or Omniture to discover how potential customers were interacting with their sites and which narratives were most effective at increasing engagement and time-on-site. These tools, however, do not work on FB, so you’re blind when it comes to seeing how people are interacting with you on FB. A recent article in Forbes (“What’s a ‘Like’ Worth?”, http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0808/technology-social-media-facebook-google-like-worth.html) shows how vexing this problem is becoming. FB is expanding metrics available to page owners, but only those that suit it’s own purposes. And some, like Hiten Shah of KISSmetrics, think that the old way of analyzing these interactions is dead: “Facebook is giving you data that are relevant to the Facebook model … the page-view game is done with anyway. We want to track people, not page views.”
It’s precisely that, tracking people, that is becoming harder as FB gobbles up interactions with web browsers and people stay longer on FB and less on your site. Are on-page analytics really dead, or do we just need to figure out a way to tease that data out of FB and marry it with what’s going on in the non-FB web? Stay tuned, it’s going to get interesting …
