Facebook has delivered on a promise to show how many users are actively using its popular platform.
Responding to urgent demand for such stats by eager developers and others, the company now shows how many “daily active users” each Facebook application has. This user “engagement” calculation is based on Facebook’s analysis of pageviews, click-throughs between pages, and actions taken within a page — including playing a Flash-based game or video.
It follows Facebook’s promise Monday to deliver such tools — an effort to provide public measurements about usage of applications developed by third parties, among other changes.
The effect is similar to a web site being forced to publicly reveal its daily traffic numbers, a bit like walking around naked for anxious developers. Of course, having this information public is great for advertisers because they have a clearer view of which applications have Facebook user’s attention — where they can get the most bang for their buck on the site.
Many companies with Facebook applications have already been featuring such attention-focused metrics. Facebook is considered more effective than other social networks at capturing its users’ attention through news feeds, pokes and other carefully designed features, as Jeremy Liew wrote yesterday. Myspace widgets have lower click-through rates than Facebook apps. Users stay on those widgets for less time than on apps, Liew finds.
Strikingly, though, nearly all of the applications with millions of users appear to average daily active user rates between approximately ten and twenty percent, as can be seen here — while many applications with smaller total users boast far higher daily active user rates.
Third party developers are also developing third-party measuring tools.
Adonomics, formerly Appaholic, has been tracking growth and changes occurring among Facebook applications. The company says it will also provide “stock-market style analyses” of Facebook features, hoping to provide even more information about how much applications are worth in terms of advertising dollars.
2 Comments
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Lee Lorenzen said:
Altura Ventures, the world’s first facebook-only VC firm, applauds facebook for taking this step on Facebook’s part to push developers towards building more engaging applications.
As they say: “if you can measure it, you can manage it.” Up until now, Facebook only measured (or rather only published) the net number of App Users. This led many developers to focus solely on this one metric — in fact, even the number of installs vs. uninstalls per day was hidden.
Jesse Farmer, CTO of Adonomics, an Altura Ventures portfolio company, is enhancing the Adonomics API to allow app developers to begin to track a whole host of metrics and to truly measure and manage the complete lifecycle of their users. This will include the integration of the new stats that Facebook is now publishing on a daily basis in addition to the time-based graphs that Adonomics (formerly Appaholic) presents to show the history of each app.
I’m pleased to see these moves by Facebook towards more transparency in their metrics. With increased transparency will come increased trust from advertisers who simply want to spend their dollars wisely. In addition, this is yet another sign that Facebook is taking care of their most valuable asset: the attention span of their user base.
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Jeremiah Owyang said:
I think they got their terms of the measurement attributes confused, as they’re really measuring Interaction, not engagement. I also think you may have confused Attention (no worries, a common oversight) too, which is ‘time spent’.
details here:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/08/31/facebook-to-rank-applications-by-interaction-not-engagement/
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3:10 am
Facebook to rank applications by Interaction –not Engagement said:
[...] formula of engagement, so I’ve got a pretty good sense of what it is and what it’s not. Venture Beat covered the story, but I think they got the attributes mixed up between attention and [...]