2014.10.13

Facebook (non-)Insights

There was a spike of traffic to Comparea over the weekend:

Spike of traffic to comparea.org

Awesome! All of it came from Facebook and went to a comparison of France vs Australia:

All traffic coming from Facebook

I can easily get insight into who tweeted it. But Facebook is a big black box. In theory, I can use Facebook Insights to track this. It claims that 50 actions have led to ~2400 visits to my site, but declines to say anything more:

All information is suppressed

I understand that Facebook is more private than Twitter, but this is frustrating. I’d hope to at least see which country the shares are happening in. Are these French people coming to Comparea? Australians? Facebook won’t even reveal that all the recent visits are to a single URL! I’d think that thousands of clicks would be enough to provide anonymity there.

I’m not sure exactly what sorts of insights Facebook can share without revealing identities, but I’d very much hoped for more than this.

Has anyone had positive experiences with Facebook Insights?

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