Reminder: Graph API v2.2 is no longer available as of March 27, 2017. For more details see the changelog.
 
 
 

Overview of Facebook Analytics for Apps

Facebook Analytics for Apps helps you understand how people are using your desktop and mobile websites, iOS and Android apps and even Bots for messenger. With well over 1.7B monthly users and growing, we built Analytics for Apps using the same tools, techniques and infrastructure to help you grow your business.

Whether you're focused on retention, engagement, or conversion, Analytics for Apps has the tools you need, including funnels, cohorts, segmentation, breakdown tables, automated push campaigns and more. We also provide deep demographic information and audience insights to help you understand your audience, and more accurately segment to analyze behavior. Think of it as your one-stop growth shop:

  1. It's completely free to use no matter how many users your apps have or events you send.

  2. Your app doesn't need to use Facebook Login or any other Facebook service.

  3. Your data is visible in minutes, not days.

To get started, use our quickstart or take a look at our guided demo:

Also, checkout analytics.facebook.com for a great summary of the features offered by Analytics for Apps, customer stories and more.

Events, Properties, and Parameters

Data in Analytics for Apps is driven by App Events and User Properties. Events are used to describe user activity in your application whilst user properties can be assigned to users to support better segmentation.

For example, in a Travel website and application you might fire a 'Search' event whenever a person uses your search function. This event can be enriched with parameters of your choosing, such as 'Search Type' which might be 'Flight', 'Hotel' or 'Car'. This data and event stream can be used to see trends in search usage over time and, combined with segmentation could be used, to understand the demographics of users who use your search function frequently or use a specific search type frequently.

You can also assign attributes to your users with User Properties which can be used in segmentation. App Events describe something a user did, where properties describe an attribute of the user. For example, their Frequent Flyer Status might be Gold, or they may have been a Member Since 2012. User properties can be set from your app or website using the SDK or using our server-to-server API, which is a great way to leverage your CRM data with Analytics for Apps.

Analytics for Apps has many reports that can help you better understand your customers and their behavior, including:

Funnels - Funnels allow you to monitor People's journey's through your experiences - whether that's an e-commerce checkout experience, registration or sign up process or how far people make it through your New User Experience (NUX), funnels are the best way to identify where you should spend your resources and optimize your app.

Cohorts - After acquisition, retention is the other half of the growth equation. Cohorts are the way to understand how well you're retaining your users and, more importantly how changes to your app are affecting that retention. With Analytics for Apps behavioral cohorts, we can even look at how changes to your app affect Lifetime Value (LTV) or any other event you care about.

Segments - To really understand your users you need to zoom and understand different audiences. Whether that's seeing the demographics of your top performing customers by value or seeing how well a particular demographic converts in your funnels - segmentation is supported on most reports in Analytics for Apps.

People, Not Devices

All reports provide a cross-device view of user activity by default as we believe that to really understand customer behavior you must understand the person and not their devices. Cross-device analytics makes it easy to monitor activity across devices and get a complete view of the customer journey.

To see these charts accurately you'll need to emit certain events from your app:

ChartEvent (web)Event (mobile)Event (bots)

Active Users

Page View*

App Activation

Message sent or received

App Launches

Not applicable

App Activation

Not applicable

App Installs

Not applicable

App Activation

Not applicable

Median Session Length

Page View*

App Activation

Not applicable

Revenue

Purchase with Value Parameter

Purchase with Value Parameter

Purchase with Value Parameter

Age and Gender

Page View*

App Activation

Message sent or received

Country

Page View*

App Activation

Message sent or received

Platform

Page View*

App Activation

Message sent or received

Complete Registration

Completed Registration

Completed Registration

Not applicable

In order to show accurate user numbers the 'Page View' event should be logged from all pages in your website, whether using the JavaScript SDK or Web Pixel.