Digital Marketing and Web Strategy by Bob Hazlett | One Half Amazing!

PHP, Web and IT Stuff has a great tutorial on tracking Facebook Fan Page activity with Google Analytics.   Yes, Facebook does have Insights tracking that any page administrator can access, but it only shows you data for fans and sometimes you’ll see a couple days delay in getting that information.

In short, here’s how they did it.  Facebook pages will limit the amount of javascript that can be run on a page.  Google Analytics requires javascript to work correctly.  As a workaround, they’ve created a tool that allows you to embed your Google Analytics code in an image instead of using the standard javascript.  You’ll have to create an image for each page you’d like to track.  For example, if you have separate custom tabs set up on Facebook to display your products,  talk about your services and give users an option to contact you, you’ll need 3 different image tag codes.

To get started, set up a Google Analytics account or add a new website profile if you already have one.  Find your account number within the tracking code they provide.  It will look something like UA-1234567-74. Finally, use their tool to create a custom image tag and then place it at the bottom of each page you need to track. FBML is a great tool to add HTML to your Facebook page.

If you’re super-cool, you can even host the code yourself.  Hosting it yourself gives you the ability to see traffic to and from your site to your Facebook page.

The biggest benefits to using Google Analytics over the package that Facebook provides is the ability to track all users, not just the few that have become fans.  Google also gives you all of the other functions like time on site, keyword tracking and map overlays.

Just past midnight last night, Facebook pushed a feature to their pages that allows administrators to publish posts, links, photos, and videos to fans based on their location and language preference.  A post that is published to Facebook users in a specific location or language will only be visible to those users. Other users will never see the post in the News Feed, on your Page, or anywhere else across Facebook.  I think this is huge for facebook pages.

Some examples of Pages that may find this useful are:

• Global brands who have tons of Fans across the world, may want to talk about a new product that is only available in a certain location.
• Musicians & Celebrities who may want to announce to fans in California that new tour dates have been added across the state.
• Retail shops that may want to let fans in a certain city know that a new shop is opening locally.