Question

Is it possible to track how often and/or when a Facebook user is using any facebook app? What if they have installed one of your apps, can this be used to collect statistics about app usage? For instance, you could say that a user spent 8 hours playing Farmville in the past 24 hours. Or even total usage of a specific app. What statistic can be collected about the use of facebook apps and how can this be done?

Answer 1

When you register your application, you can get detailed analytics about the demographics of your users and how users are sharing from your application with Insights.

The Graph API provides programmatic access to all of this data so you can integrate Platform data into your own, custom analytics systems.

To download Insights data, you first need to obtain an OAuth access token associated with your application via the OAuth Client Credentials Flow. You can obtain an access token for your application with:

curl -F grant_type=client_credentials \
     -F client_id=your_app_id \
     -F client_secret=your_app_secret \
     https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token

Once you have your application access token, you can download analytics data for your application at:

https://graph.facebook.com/app_id/insights?access_token=...

That URL outputs all of the analytics data available via the API, including the total number of users, number of active users, and a number of other detailed metrics. For example, you can get the number of users who have seen pages shared from your site with:

https://graph.facebook.com/app_id/insights/share_views/day?access_token=...

You can use since and until to specify the time range for which you want data. Both arguments accept times in almost any valid date format:

https://graph.facebook.com/app_id/insights?access_token=...&since=yesterday

Explore the Insights product and the base /insights URL for more a complete list of metrics available.

I hope it will help you.