Want to track how many clicks you are getting on those news stories being posted to your Facebook Page? While Facebook hasn’t provided any tool to track clicks yet, there’s one in the works as buzzmarketing daily notes. For now, Facebook will only be providing page administrators with estimated click through rates. While not as useful as tracking every single stream post’s activity, many administrators will be happy to see the new feature.
Facebook describes the new service as follows:
Stream CTR / ETR: This graph is a measure of the Click Through Rate and Engagement Rate for your content appearing in the Facebook News Feed. If a user clicks on one of your posts, that will be counted as Stream CTR. If a user likes or comments on one of your posts, that will be counted in the Stream ETR. Please note that Stream data is based on a sample and therefore is an estimate of your Stream CTR and ETR. (Coming soon)
There are a number of Insights improvements that we’re hoping for and this was one of them. We’d also like to see the ability to track conversion rates of Facebook Page visitors into new fans. It would also be excellent to track clicks on every story, rather than viewing estimated click through rates on a daily basis. Right now many of the metrics are approximate and while useful for tracking average engagement levels, they aren’t useful for quantitative marketing analysis.
While I’d like to be a fan of Facebook’s Insights product, Google Analytics provides much more effective tracking for those looking to keep track of direct sales or new leads. For example, Google provides a conversion funnel tracking tool which enables marketers to perform split testing among various designs and different copy. Regardless of features that are lacking, Facebook continues to iterate on their Insights product which is great to see.
![[Inside Social Apps 2012]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/ISA2012_336x100_F_RegisterNow.gif)
![[AllFacebook Stats: Facebook Analytics for Your Business]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/stpro_allfacebookstats.gif)
![[How can Facebook change your business?]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/FMB_A_MAY2011_336x100_F.gif)
this will encourage more individuals to create fan pages, create more links from notes & walls to fan pages & drive more of the content onto fan pages. Not exactly what Facebook wants to see, but what they have engendered.
That process, in turn, will accelerate the eventual availability of metrics to home pages, walls, notes, photos, and videos.
While I'd love to see full blown Google Analytics embedded natively in Facebook today, what is being done now is a better roadmap for the long-term. Can we hope to see commentary from Eric T. Peterson, Avinash Kaushik, and other giants of the web analytics industry grow a few pears or apricots (joke) & weigh in on this matter.
Comment by Rich Reader — September 4, 2009 @ 7:06 am
That would be interesting to find out how many clicks are on each thing…
Comment by Brian M T Warner — September 4, 2009 @ 10:09 am
Thanks for the linklove! I didn't get a chance to blog about it yet but I've also seen a new column on one of my ad reports that's titled "conversions." I'm assuming this will measure ad click-throughs then turned into fans. It's really exciting! I'm sure they're just testing it out with this client but I'll keep you posted as I learn more!
Comment by Helen Todd — September 5, 2009 @ 8:52 am