Google Analytics for Facebook Pages | Hacker News Reader

Google Analytics for Facebook Pages

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46 pointsthemanual10 comments

This covers fan pages - anybody know how to do the same for personal pages, in case you feel like snooping on people who are looking you up?

But then I see this:

http://grownupgeek.com/facebook-forums-whos-been-looking-at-...

Apparently it's against the TOS.

The value of Facebook would plunge to a fraction if that was possible. If you, before every click, had to consider what the "target" would make of your visit. Am I visiting too often? Too rarely? So my girlfriends ex is visiting my profile fairly often, what's up with that?

I don't think your assumption is correct. Most Chinese social networking sites, by default, allow you to see a list of the most recent people who viewed your profile, and the exact time they viewed it at.

It's probably a cultural thing, but still think saying that its value will "drop to a fraction" is a bit apocalyptic, especially if you can disable the feature.

I think he was talking of a scenario where the option to disable it did not exist, in which case I completely agree with him. But if there was an option to turn it off, I think we can all agree that most users would choose to and facebook would probably be saved.

Facebook relies on the user having a positive experience with the site. It aims to smooth social interactions. God knows how many girls I've "stalked" (I dislike this term but that's a different point entirely) and I've used the information I gained from anonymously browsing their profile to chat them up. Call me a creep but us primates like using tools :)

Believe me, most people stalk others. I firmly believe Facebook is where it is today thanks to the privacy that enables us to do so.

The dutch social network Hyves introduced this a few years ago, and set it on by default. They got a LOT of comments over this (which they handled quite well: sending around flowers and all). But within a day it reverted to off by default. You can still switch it on, so others see your visit's, but I think it's not that common. Power users (paying) do get some aggregate stats tho (last month, 40 people, of which 54% girls, visited your profile.)

This won't tell WHO has been looking at your fan page either, at least not specifically. The data is fairly anonymous.

If your profile isn't freely visible to the public, you can make a pretty educated guess based on city.

It's only valid for pages built with FBML. So it's good for tabs (sections) but not for the main page itself. The main page is a newsfeed where you just can't put any FBML. So it makes an interesting tool to track subpages but in general it's pretty useless. Clever idea though.

I wonder if this might lead Facebook to start caching images on fan pages like they sometimes do for images in apps.

They already do this... everything is run through a proxy and cached for a few minutes (regardless of etag or anything else).

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