Published on the Compete.com blog on 22 Feb 2008

• 15.4 million Facebook users interacted with fb Application pages (@ apps.facebook.com) in January:

  

• On average ~51% of Facebook’s user base engages with Application pages:

  

• In January, fb Application pages directly contributed 1.5 billion pages (8.4% of total) to Facebook.com’s total page view count. Given the trend, I expect Application pages to gradually form a larger chunk of Facebook.com’s overall page views over time.

  Note: Stats in this post are limited to activity on apps.facebook.com. Most Facebook Applications load pages in iframes from 3rd party (non-facebook) servers. According to sources, users can generate well over >10 page views on 3rd party servers for each one that they see on apps.facebook.com. In January, Compete estimates ~1.5 billion page loads of apps.facebook.com, which translates to roughly 11-12 billion page views across Facebook app iframes.

  

• 6-month gains in time spent, sessions, and page views generated on apps.facebook.com:

  

Bottom-line:
This data reinforces the fact that Facebook’s Application strategy and ongoing refinements appear to be working. Now the big question — as Facebook’s unique visitor growth plateaus, what will be their next traffic growth engine? They are still 36 million short of MySpace.com’s 67 million U.S. unique visitors.

Published on the Compete.com blog on 19 February 2008

Does privacy matter to most Facebook users? Take a look at the chart below, and judge for yourself (weekly unique visitors to facebook’s privacy settings pages):

Even after all the recent mainstream media coverage and debate surrounding Facebook’s controversial beacon program, online privacy in general, and Facebook making available universal beacon opt-out — traffic to Facebook’s privacy settings pages has essentially been flat. NOT A GOOD SIGN!

It’s likely that the average Facebook user DOES care about their privacy, and know they should do something about it, but are mostly unaware or don’t know what they can or should do. Should Facebook be doing more around online privacy education? There is a lot of unintended sharing going on, and I think it is in Facebook’s long term best interest to do so.

A number of Compete.com updates were released today!

1. Cleaner Results with Report Overviews

Now when you run a Search Analytics report, you will see a new “Report Overview” table above each report. Big plans for this section. Look out for more here in the near future.

2. More Search Analytics data on Site Analytics

The layout of the new Search Analytics module on Site Analytics is much cleaner, and also includes a new metric — the total number of keywords that are driving traffic to the domain.

In the screenshot below, you see immediately that the gurus at Amazon are doing a much better job of milking the long tail than Walmart. Over a 10x difference – 286,306 keywords drive traffic to Amazon.com vs. just 27,206 keywords to Walmart.com!

How are you doing vs. your competitors?

click here for a more complete list of updates