The Shyam

In my current term at ISB, I am taking a course on “Leveraging Social Media and Analytics”. Very awesome and interesting course, but it also has a project where we take a deep dive into one company’s Google Adwords, Google Analytics and Facebook Ads data.

Now Google analytics is brilliant at allowing users to see who’s visiting their websites, where are they coming from, what they do on it, etc. Its a very powerful tool, and especially since it integrates greatly with Google AdWords, providing a great one two punch for Google and is their big selling point.

Now enter Facebook, with their Ads. The biggest thing lost from FB’s point of view is data on how useful their ads are, how many conversions you get etc. This is still possible to figure out through correlation between FB’s ad data and Google Analytics. But is still a huge pain point from FB’s and FB user’s point of view. So why doesn’t Facebook offer something like Google Analytics?

Well, you might say, Google Analytics is the biggest one out there, and people require to put a code snippet in their websites to track usage, and they won’t do it twice or won’t take the hassle.

But think about this. Facebook already has their code snippets in most websites, either through their Like buttons, Share to Facebook buttons and who knows what buttons. All it takes is for them to include their tracking and analytic code snippet as part of these buttons. Suddenly, you realize that their tracking code could already be present in a gazillion odd websites, ready for analytics.

All Facebook needs to do is turn it on, and link to Facebook Analytics and voila : Facebook Analytics could have a huge installed base right off the bat!

Now this is all out there, but just a thought I had. Crazy? Logical? What do people think?