Facebook Offers Free Analytics for Apps Tool
At today's F8 conference Facebook unveiled a new developer tool that will help app marketers segment and target audiences as well as understand consumer path to purchase and in-app pain points.
At today's F8 conference Facebook unveiled a new developer tool that will help app marketers segment and target audiences as well as understand consumer path to purchase and in-app pain points.
In addition to the news that Facebook will turn Messenger into an e-commerce platform, the social behemoth also introduced Analytics for Apps today, which will help app marketers better target campaigns based on social data.
Analytics for Apps works with IOS, Android, and Canvas apps.
The feature aims to help marketers understand how consumers are using their product by providing customer breakdowns of age, language, gender, and country. It will also show how many of the customers who downloaded the app ended up making purchases on a brand’s website, along with pinpointing in-app pain points that caused consumers to uninstall.
The addition of Analytics for Apps is probably Facebook’s attempt to make sure marketers had some measurement system after the company recently booted some of its outside measurement tools, according to Oren Kaniel, chief executive (CEO) of AppsFlyer.
“With all of the changes that have taken place in recent months, like TUNE getting kicked off the Facebook MMP program and Ad-X going away, Facebook probably wanted to make sure its advertisers had at least some sort of measurement tool should other changes in the market take place,” Kaniel says. “App marketers need some way of measuring the performance of their install ad campaigns, otherwise they are just flying blind. If they have insight into their campaigns based on how new users are behaving inside their apps and can attribute that performance to specific ad campaigns, they can then re-invest in the campaigns that work well and either tweak or cut out the campaigns that are under-performing.”
However, Kaniel warns that while Analytics for Apps might be an analytics solution for small businesses, larger businesses will probably want to depend on independent tools to ensure unbiased measurements. “Larger app marketers probably won’t want to use Facebook’s measurement product because they’ll likely be advertising on Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Apple, and other major publishers that Facebook might not support or would have conflict of interest with, which means that those bigger marketers will want to go with an independent measurement partners to make sure they’re getting 100 percent unbiased data,” Kaniel says.
Analytics for Apps is currently available for free on Facebook’s Developer dashboard.