Some Facebook Pages Now Reveal ‘Impression’ Counts to page admins

But another number to add to the analytics spreadsheet, this gives the most specific data on “impressions” of Facebook page feed entries to date. But how an impression is defined by facebook is not entirely clear. Does this mean someone actually paused to read it while scrolling their News Feed? Did they visit the fan page while it was top post?

What is clear is that impressions has nothing to do with clickthrus, however, it is a more specific number than “reach,” which in the case of facebook or twitter — where people with inflated friend and follower counts regularly republish and retweet — quickly inflates into the millions with little true effect.

So what of it? And why now? And why do I only see this on ONE of many FB pages that I admin? And when can I get moar moar moar data please facebook?

After poking around I found that Facebook began rolling this feature out last night and the reaction has been one of – meh – curiosity. According to Nick at AllFacebook, there is an FB-definition of impression:

The number of impressions displayed for a post is the raw number of impressions shown to users. These impressions may appear in users’ News Feeds, visits to Pages or through a Fan Box widget.

This is part of a broader upgrade to Facebook page admin controls that favors stats helpful to prospective advertisers, writes Eric Eldon at InsiderFacebook.

I can’t stop thinking about how incredibly vague and useless this information is — other than for baiting potential advertisers. I mean, the data isn’t even aggregated on the [already minimal] Insight Page. And — I know sending updates from fan pages is sooo 2008, but there is still zero indication as to how many people receive, view, open, click on the updates regardless of how you slice the update (which you can customize by city, state, country, sex, and age)…

It is Facebook, and I won’t complain — I’ll take what I can get for free. But I’m still see a big part of their monetization coming not just from ads but from shedding more and more light into a user’s or product’s analytics at variable costs.