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Google Analytics for Facebook Apps

by Jesse Stay — published on July 11th, 2007

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Today, Facebook announced they were releasing a new FBML tag for developers that would allow developers of Facebook Apps to track their applications via Google Analytics. Before this, because the code you put on your page is javascript, there was no way to track your apps. I tried to install this, but ran into issues, in that Google tries to look at your main facebook app page for the javascript (which isn’t parsed by Facebook), while Facebook gives an error if you put the raw Javascript on the page. I came up with the below solution, which works like a beauty - you put your javascript between your <fb:google-analytics> tags, like this:


<fb:google-analytics uacct="12345">

<script type="text/javascript">

...

</script>

</fb:google-analytics>

Since Google reads the plain callback url it won’t interpret the fb:google-analytics, and Facebook ignores everything between the <fb:google-analytics></fb:google-analytics> tags. Works like a charm on mine.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Facebook, Howtos, OSS, Perl, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. .

  • Hmm.. interesting observation. I wonder if you can add adsense code this way

  • What URL did you give to google? For example, I gave apps.google.com/liarliar as the URL.

  • Typo -- that should have been apps.facebook.com/liarliar

  • You can't add your facebook url - it has to be the url your facebook canvas page is pointing to. My url is http://grandcentral.jessestay.com - my facebook callback page points to that, and that's what gets loaded in the iframe. Google can also read that, as there is no authentication required, so I just put the above code in my footer for that page.

  • Ah ok thanks.

  • I don't think adsense code would work that way - it may be readable outside Google, but facebook completely ignores what's between those tags. Facebook needs to render the javascript for you, or it will generate an error.


    One way you could get around it possibly is if you could figure out a way to read the output of the javascript for the ads, and convert it to flash. Flash/SWF works just fine in Facebook (with some limits on the profile pages).

  • What I did, was just make a new index.html, put the code it it, hit the page, let google return the hit -- that 'activated' me. Now I've gone back to normal.

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