My wish list to Facebook Santa

Facebook is awesome. We are the first ones to tip our hats when they come out with great new ideas like the open graph protocol, the “like” button, Facebook Connect, etc. Nevertheless, I must say that Facebook’s constant search of new offerings is getting in the way of its improvement. When I see the news of Facebook heavily investing its resources on new features, I get nervous. The reason is that there are plenty of services that Facebook already offers that need improvement, specially when it comes to analytics. Let’s go through the list:

1. Facebook Insights for Pages – I would love to have the capability to analyze which tabs people spent the most time on and which tabs have the highest bounce rate. I’m not even going to get into how awful and unfriendly the graphs are on there (I believe it’s a given).
2. Facebook Ads – There is plenty of room for improvement here, so let’s take a step at a time:

• Not being able to set a budget for the whole campaign is a turn off. Right now, FB only allows you to set a daily budget, which you have to watch carefully constantly to make sure you are on track. Please give us the choice of setting the budget for the whole campaign!
• Currently, Insights report on clicks and actions. Actions can mean “Likes” or engagement like a RSVP to an event. C’mon FB! Just give us the number of “likes” (fans) we received, so we can accurately measure our results.
• The graphs for ad results, once again fall short by limiting the variables to clicks, impressions and CTR. I say we need to add at least “likes” (fans), cost per like and conversion rate (clicks/likes).
• The landing page of the ads can go two ways right now: a FB page (internal link) or an external link to the company’s website. What if I want the people who click on the ad to land on the FB page, but on a different tab? The only way to keep it “internal” is to link it to the page and set the page to have your special tab as a landing page for everyone. If you used the url for that specific tab on the ad, it would be no longer “internal”, which means people cannot become fans right from the ad. Here’s what we need: an option to set a FB Page’s tab as an “internal” link, allowing people to become fans right from the ad and land on a specific tab.

These are the things that will be included in my list to Facebook Santa this year.

What’s intriguing about Facebook not investing in these features is that there are thousands of companies out there who would be willing to pay for these services. I definitely would.

If there is anything to add to this list, please feel free to do so in the comments.

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