January 25, 2008
Facebook Now Offering App Stats, of a Sort...
One of the ways I've been keeping tabs on the level activity around the Course Profiles Facebook app has been to check the app's developers page, which until today has reported the number of users and also displayed the last few http request stats...
...but looking just now, I notice a few more reports have been made available. For example, here's a report on the number of daily active users over the last couple of weeks:
There are several other weekly reports being made available too:
The unique canvas page views graph broadly follows the daily activie users, but the people who visit do seem to have multiple views of the canvas page, so maybe they are visiting several times a day?
The HTTP Requests tab gives a listing of the most recent HTTP requests, a report that always was made available. Howver, a better way of analysing that information is via Google Analytics, which we've been running for some time (although we only added goal tracking a couple of days ago).
For example, here are the most popular 'pages' over the last month:
In the case of B201, for example, the course comment wall has become a meeting place for students about to start on the course. The "official" OU course forums open a week before the start of the course, I think, but these students are obviously keen to meet up and chat before then. The study buddy page for that course has also seen quite a bit of activity, so it'll be interesting to find out whether any 'friends' have actually been made using that facility.
Looking further down the results listing (not shown ;-), there appear to be quite a few active course comment and study buddy pages, particularly for level 1 courses, which tend to have a larger population than higher level courses. At least one masters level course is also showing study buddy activity too, which is interesting.
So... I need to start asking myself a couple of things...
Firstly, I wonder what the best way is of reconciling data about users' course declarations (taken anonymously from the app database) and the Google Analytics data? There is a limited export function from GA, so I can get a dump of active pages, for example, then see how well the activity correlates to user declarations. But I'm not sure how useful that would be? Certainly I want to find some sort of course reporting format that I can show to any interested course teams, but what sort of information would it be useful for them to know? And why?
The second major question is privacy - should I even be considering offering course teams reports about usage of course related activity within the Facebook app? And how far can I go reporting the activity in general on this public blog, so you, my dear readers ;-), can see what sorts of reports are becoming available? (Maybe if I show real reports, but obfuscate the course codes, it would be okay?)
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Tags: facebook, course profiles, google analytics, googalytics, web analytics, webalytics, user stats
Posted by ajh59 at January 25, 2008 10:44 PM