How Can an App Developer Take Advantage of the New Facebook App Insights?

Taking Advantage of App Insights

Facebook developers have had the luxury of using Insights to measure the performance of their apps for some time. Only recently, however, have they been able to do all their analyzing from the convenience of the interface that allows them to manage their applications. Here is how developers can take advantage of this new freedom with App Insights :

View User Activity – On the user page, you can view a graph of all the user activity associated with your app. This page breaks down user activity on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, allowing you to see demographics, the number of installs and uninstalls, click rates, and more. Like most analytics tool, App Insights takes an anonymous approach to serving up user statistics, meaning that the names of individual users are not revealed.

View Newsfeed Activity – Developers can use the Newsfeed page to view detailed statistics on the number of stories published, impressions, and clicks for their app. This page is useful for learning insights into the feedback on your application whether it is positive or negative. By looking at the red and green areas on the graphs, developers can determine if their app is in good overall standings, or suffering from a lot of negative feedback.

View Credits Data – App Insights offers two new areas developers can use to gauge the performance of their applications. One of them is the Newsfeed page covered above. The other is Credits. On the Credits page, developers can view information about the credits being spent on their applications as well as the chargebacks and refunds they are generating. This feature is currently only available to app administrators.

As a developer, having a way to track and measure the performance of your apps is extremely important. And although analytics for Facebook applications have been available through the Insights Dashboard for a while now, the recent move to add this luxury directly in the Developer App is a significant update that is sure to be embraced.