Tracking user engagement on Facebook fan pages
In our previous blog post we showed how to setup Google Analytics for Facebook fan pages. The article was very well received and highlighted the importance of improved analytics. Please review the older article for detailed instructions on how to setup Google Analytics. Here are a few interesting concepts which will help you build better Facebook fan pages and also take your Analytics information one step further:
Fans versus Non Fan activity
An interesting way to look at your Facebook fan page activity is to split them with activity by your Fans and non fans. To do this, we need to use segments in Google Analytics to split activity into Fan and Non-Fan activity. You can create a segment based on pages visited by your user or specific event.
Using segments to track Fan/Non Fan activity
We will need to use FBJS (Facebook Javascript) and the tag <fb:visible-to-connection>. The tag will allow us to display a section to Fans and another to Non-Fans. We have managed to use this to create a single action button but calling different FBJS functions depending on whether the user is a fan of the page or not. Once a Javascript function is activated, the appropriate tracking image has to be shown to log the visit correctly on Google Analytics. Displaying this tracking image causes a hit to be registered on Google Analytics and this can be used to segment traffic. Visit our tracking page to get the code and see this in action.
Tracking activity on forms and on your pages
This is a good method to track user engagement with the Facebook page. Several users might visit your Facebook page but only a few might actually engage with the form. When your custom Facebook fan page loads, Facebook does not activate the Javascript you have written. This is only activated when a user performs an activity. Something like clicking on a button, clicking of your form, playing a video, entering some details onto the form, clicking on a button of your carousel, etc. This is a good opportunity to track activity on your page. All you have to do is use a script tag like the one used in the Advanced tracking page.
Goal and Funnel Visualisation
This can be a quite powerful tool, you can track for example how many users visit your contact page, how many then proceed to engage with the page and how many eventually click on the contact button. Here is an example of a funnel visualisation.
A simple two step funnel visualisation
The above two step funnel visualisation shows you how many users visited our contact page and how many proceeded to submit the form. This could have also been made into a three step funnel displaying how many visited the contact page, how many clicked around and how many actually clicked the contact button.
Tracking Purchases or clicks on your fan page
To track clicks which can be purchases, clicks on links, etc. We generate a tracking code for each action that we want to track using our trusted Google Analytics code generator. We then load this image location on click of a button, or link, etc using the usual onclick event handler.
In conclusion
These techniques require some knowledge of Javascript and a reasonable understanding of how the image technique lets you work around Facebook’s Javascript restriction. You can get the complete source code to how we segregate fan and non fan visits, etc here. We are a web development company and will be happy to help you out with your unique tracking needs on your Facebook page. Please share your thoughts, comments and ideas on how to track user behaviour in more depth.
Read more at www.webdigi.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment