Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Measuring Data with Facebook Insights

You can start a business strategy by knowing a little about the users who visit your site. Many sites use analytics tools like Google Analytics or Omniture to track visitor data. The problem with these tools is that they rely on an IP address to learn who is visiting. An IP address is quite useful at tracking things around the Web, but the problem is that each of those IP addresses is just a “thing.” IP addresses don't equate to people or real personalities — they equate to computers.

An IP address is just a numerical ID, like 64.54.82.182, that's assigned to each computer on the Internet. The servers that provide Web sites have IP addresses, and the users' computers, which consume those Web sites, also have IP addresses.

That's where Facebook Insights, shown in Figure 15-1, comes in. Facebook provides its own analytics tool for any Webmaster or page owner, called Insights, that you can integrate into your Web site to understand more about what specific demographics are visiting your Web site.

Insights provides a slew of information about your visitors who are Facebook users. Facebook takes the data provided by the users visiting your Web site or Facebook Page and combines it into a cumulative set of information about the users who are visiting your site. Information, at least as I write this, available by Insights includes the following: ...