While Facebook provides business owners with tracking capability called Facebook Insights to measure Facebook page activity, my experience has been that the data is inaccurate, and the data presentation is difficult to interpret.
The good news is that you can add Google Analytics code to your Static FBML applications on your custom Facebook pages to measure activity using Google Analytics. The bad news is that you can no longer measure overall Facebook page activity since Facebook removed the boxes from their pages and profiles. You’ll only be able to track activity from any custom pages that you have added.
Let’s go through the steps required to add Google Analytics tracking to your custom Facebook page.
Create a New Google Analytics Profile
1) Go to your Google Analytics account where you want to capture activity from Facebook
2) Create a new website profile by clicking on the “Add new profile” link in the upper right of the main table
3) Check “Add a profile for a new domain” and enter “facebook.com” in the field for the URL of the site you want to track
4) Click continue
5) Copy the Google Analytics tracking ID from the next page – it’s the line of characters that starts with “UA-” – paste this in Word or a text editor because you’ll need it later
Get the Image Tracking Code
Facebook limits the javascript code you can include on your custom pages, and the Google Analytics javascript will not execute in your Static FBML application on your custom Facebook page. Fortunately, the team at Webdigi have created a free hosted service called FBGAT that will enable you to embed an invisible image in your custom Facebook page that calls the Google Analytics tracking code every time your custom page is viewed. You can also install the FBGAT service on your own host, if that’s better for you.
Here’s how you get the image code and add it to your Static FBML application on Facebook.
1) Go to http://ga.webdigi.co.uk/
2) Enter the Google Analytics tracking ID that you created earlier in the “Analytics Code” box
3) Enter a page link (don’t forget the “/”) and title for the custom Facebook page that you will recognize when you view it in Google Analytics
4) Click the “Generate Code” button to generate the image tracking code
5) Cut and paste the generated code snippet into the Static FBML application for the custom Facebook page you want to track – be sure to paste it below any other code in the FBML box
It takes about 24 hours for Google Analytics to start picking up your Facebook activity, but you will then be able to use all of the capabilities of Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your custom Facebook page.
You might also like:
