360DigitalInfluence

When I first read about a new work-around to add Google Analytics to Facebook Pages I was set to geek out and asked recent FBML experts Mike Mangi and Jay Marrow to help me set it up.  I added it to our 360 DI Facebook Page and let it run for about five days.

Verdict: Nice to have but not need to have. Not worth the trouble for basic Pages but an easy lift to add to a custom Tab for campaign tracking. Details after the jump.

What I liked:

• Referring sites from Google Analytics shows where visitors are coming from so seeing whether your website, a search engine, a blog, or Facebook drives the most traffic is useful
• New visits versus returning visits is a good indication of how people are using your site
• Goal completion can show you which tabs users are visiting most frequently but remember this can only track tabs where the image can be embedded
• Would be a free and easy tool to add to a custom tab you’ve built as a landing page or a contest to see tab-specific data versus your Page as a whole

What I didn’t like:

• The inability to track Analytics uniformly across tabs makes this a tough sell
• Benchmarking is pretty useless as far as I can tell, since it compares you to other sites based on content it won’t look at other Facebook Pages and is more likely to look at small websites
• For what really matters on Facebook- fans, engagement, and targeting- the Insights tool will tell you a lot more than Google Analytics and one system with one Excel download is easier.

You can add the tracking image in a static FMBL box which means you can add it to tabs where you can place it, excluding many of the basic tabs like Info, Photos, and Events. We added it to two tabs for this experiment and most people will want to add it to your Wall tab or a custom landing tab.

You need to know a bit of FBML/HTML for this trick but if you do it will take you less than 10 minutes. With the constant updates Facebook is making to Insights we’ll probably see something that incorporates the best of Google Analytics in the next few months but if you’re bored this weekend go ahead and geek out a bit.