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The two key metrics that need to be closely monitored to ensure a successful application are:
Metrics are one of the keys to developing a Facebook application. Similar to any consumer web application, it is almost impossible to predict user behavior. As such, the most successful application developers tune their apps extensively through the process of trial and error. To accomplish this, developers must use metrics to measure the effectiveness of the changes they have made to their applications so that they can quickly iterate to achieve their goal of creating a successful application.
K-factor = [(total number of users converted through installs) + (total number of users converted through Notifications) + (total number of users converted through emails) + (total number of users converted through Feeds) + (total number of users converted through Profiles)] / total number of installs.
The k-factor indicates how viral, or how rapid and self-sustaining, the growth is. This number represents the number of new users that an existing user gets to install your application. If the k-factor is less than 1, the application cannot have self-sustaining organic growth. When the k-factor is 1, the application has linear growth. If the number is greater than 1, the application has “gone viral” and has self-sustaining organic growth. The goal is to obtain a k-factor of greater than 1.2 for rapid growth of your application.
Although user session time is a good indication of engagement on the Web, there are more appropriate engagement metrics for Facebook applications. With Facebook apps, the goal is to increase the interaction of the user with the application itself, because increased engagement results in increased monetization. Engagement can be broadly classified in two categories:
Application-specific engagement (for a gaming app, this could be how often a user performs a specific game action)
Social engagement, which is a count of the number of Facebook channels used by users who already have the application installed
Optimizing for both types of metrics will result in the user performing the desired actions on your site (application-specific engagement), or re-engaging other app users, in turn generating more active users of your application (social engagement).
So, how does one actually go about acquiring these metrics? The first step should be to instrument your application with Google Analytics. Though Google Analytics is really designed for the broad Web, it gives you basic information about the overall health of your Facebook app by providing you the page view count and average session time, as well as other basic metrics.
To calculate and tune the k-factor, there are a couple of possible approaches. One is to query your application data to mine for these metrics. This may seem relatively simple to do, but as your applications grow larger, the queries will become slower and start to interfere with the performance of your app. Therefore, it is not a recommended long-term solution, but it is a good starting point. The alternative is to use third-party software, such as the Kontagent analytics suite, to collect and process this data for you. It generally takes a few hours to instrument your existing application, but the result provides you deep social analytics, much like Google Analytics, tailored for social networks. Kontagent analytics provide you with virality rates, conversion, and deep metrics on all your communication channels, as well as metrics that correlate user characteristics with social behavior. You can find more information at http://www.kontagent.com.
This Cookbook gives you a unique collection of recipes for building Facebook applications using the new profile design. This easy-to-follow book not only gives you practical ways to design and build scalable applications using the Facebook Platform, it also offers strategies for successfully marketing them in this highly competitive environment. Learn what it takes to design Facebook applications that stand out among the thousands already available.
