Three interesting data points from last Friday’s TechCrunch Facebook Ecosystem Conference in Redwood City:
1. Advertisers want analytics – Facebook is gradually changing the way it measures and reports on users’ interactions and clicks, both on ads and other content. For instance, with ads and sponsored stories pointing to internal Facebook pages, marketers will soon be able to track page Likes, page post Likes, comments, @ mentions, check-ins, photo tags, and page post shares (including shares of special offers from brands). Even more granular actions can also be tracked, such as ‘claimed your offer,’ ‘viewed the page post photo,’ and ‘viewed a tab on your Page.’ You’ll be able to view these metrics in 1-day view-through and 1-, 7-, and 28-day click-through attribution windows. Not yet sure how these will integrate with Google Analytics, Adobe Omniture, or other third-party analytics packages. [Update: The SocialFresh blog has a detailed post on these new capabilities.]
2. Mobile is brutal – According to Facebook’s VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer, part of the difficulty Facebook faces in reaching mobile users is that 7,000 different device types are used to access Facebook each day. There’s no way they can quickly make significant updates to the platform and test them thoroughly on that many devices. Facebook is currently updating its web platform once or twice per day, and its Android apps every four to six weeks. iPhone? Not so much.
3. Pictures are priceless – Users are now uploading ten billion photos to Facebook every month. And increasingly tagging, liking, sharing, and commenting on them. If pictures are this central to our online narratives, then Facebook may have been smart to pay $1-billion to prevent all that traffic from moving to Instagram.