Facebook Standardizes Engagement Metric

Facebook is standardizing its audience engagement web metric by switching from reporting daily usage to measuring monthly active users - matching the metric of monthly unique visitors used by third parties like comScore, in their own tracking of the social networking giant.

The change was announced via the company's blog, which says it will encourage developers to focus on 'longer-term engagement' and provide them with the number of users who visit their application over a longer time frame.

Firms like Nielsen and comScore already measure the audiences of blogs and social networking sites, as well as 'engagements' - the number of times a software application with video, games and other content is used by a social network member - on a monthly basis. Their reports are used by software developers and marketers to optimize their own online campaigns.

When Facebook first opened its social network to developers last year, the number of times an 'engagement' is installed on a Facebook member's profile page was the daily measure used to rank an application.

However, developers conduct their own traffic measurement to cross-reference details such as page views, demographics and rates of growth change, and these figures are collated monthly.

Earlier this year, US marketing agency Refresh Partners launched an analytics tool to provide Facebook application developers with analytic and demographic information on their users, while Facebook launched a stats tracking tool which counts the number of times a word crops up on its profiles, groups, and forums.

Web site: www.facebook.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

• comScore, Inc.
• All news
• MrWeb info