Last week, Facebook announced some changes coming to Insights in preparation for the App Center. It added a host of new statistics to follow like app rating and the number of negative feedback (people blocking an app, etc). To build upon those features, Facebook has announced some new features coming to Insights.
The new Insights features are all about unique users. You might get a whole lot of visits to your app on Facebook, but chances are they are not all unique. The higher count of unique visitors equates to your app being more popular. Think of it in terms of a band – it’s great to have a dedicated fanbase, but it’s even better to have a larger, more diverse fanbase even if they don’t show up as much as the dedicated bunch.
So that’s why Facebook is introducing unique visits to Open Graph Insights. It was impossible before to see how many unique people were sharing Open Graph stories with an app. It could have listed 10,000 stories published, but it could have been the work of one crazy obsessed fan. I’m sure you really like that fan, but you need more than just one guy to grow an app. The new Insights breaks it down by unique views over the course of 30 days. Here’s what it will look like:
What’s even cooler is that the Insights change when you limit the time frame to a single day. It opens up detailed unique user information like published actions, unique impression vs. total impressions, number of users clicking and more. Check it out:
The unique user Insights has also been extended to authorization dialogs. You can now see how many unique users have accessed the authorization dialog and how many went through with the installation. Even more impressive is that it breaks down unique users even further by each permission set. That way, you can see which users are more accepting of which permission set.
Like I said above, unique users are super important. It’s great that Facebook is now letting app developers track the number of unique views, shares and hits they’re getting. They can now use these numbers to plan future updates based around the more popular options.
