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Facebook Analytics Features Announced At F8

April 18, 2017ByAmit Finkelstein

We've been busy building the future of analytics. Today, at F8, we launched new capabilities designed to help you understand and optimize your complete customer journey across the channels you use to interact with customers, such as your app and website. At the same time, we're making it easier than ever to draw valuable insights from your data.

We're adding analytics support for Facebook Pages and offline conversions, leveraging artificial intelligence to automatically surface insights, and making our tool more customizable. Below is an overview of what's new.

Omni-channel analytics for Pages and in-store sales (open beta)
We're extending omni-channel analytics for Facebook's family of apps and services with the addition of Facebook Page interactions, such as post reactions and shares, so you can measure and understand the interactions people have with your Page alongside their other activity on your website, app, and bot.

For example, an e-commerce business can measure if people who comment on an item featured in their Page post go on to view an item on their website, or purchase it in their app. The ability to view customer behavior across different channels gives businesses a unique ability to learn about and optimize their full customer journey to drive growth.

We're also giving you the ability to see how people's online interactions translate to in-store purchases with the addition of support for offline conversions. By closing the loop between your online and offline channels, you won't have to wonder if people browsing items on your website translates into sales in your physical store.

Automated insights (open beta)
We're often surprised by the amount of time businesses spend in analytics tools — hunting for insights, anomalies or clues that will inform their next experiment and drive their next wave of growth. That's why we're pleased to announce automated insights.

Using advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence, Facebook Analytics reduces the time spent searching for clues by bringing valuable insights directly to you.

With this new feature, you'll see insights such as changes in purchases for a new version of your app, or variations in engagement across people in different cities. Getting to these insights quickly, and in an automated way, helps you easily identify where to dig deeper and determine a plan of action.

Custom dashboards (open beta)
We're making it easier to access the analytics you care about with the addition of customizable dashboards. Use custom dashboards to quickly pin your most important reports in one place, so you and your team can keep an eye on everything at a glance.

More exciting features
We also launched a number of enhancements to our existing features to help you get the most out of your analytics.

  • Streamlined event source groups: We've added the ability to create event source groups directly from your dashboard, making it straightforward to set up omni-channel analytics by combining your different event sources such as pixels, apps, and Pages.
  • Omni-channel custom audiences: You can now create custom audiences based on people's behavior across your app, website and bot, such as people who viewed an item on both your e-commerce store and your native shopping app.
  • User properties for web: User properties provides you with additional segmentation criteria based on things you know, such as a customer's frequent flyer status. We're extending support for user properties from apps to websites, and bringing this feature out of beta.

Getting started with analytics
Facebook Analytics is a powerful, free product for accessing rich audience demographics, and measuring customer behavior across channels. You don't need to use Facebook Login, and with recent updates to our SDK, implementing Facebook Analytics and logging events is now quicker and easier. To learn more, visit our quickstart guide.

Amit Finkelstein
Engineering Manager
Facebook Analytics