Outside of the fan pages, using Facebook applications allow you to capture a lot of important metrics. Building a Facebook application is like building a Web site: You need to define the strategy, brainstorm the concept, and then, with the help of a designer and a developer, actually build it before submitting the application for approval so that it can appear in its directory and be made available to all users. If you’ve built a Facebook application and have it running on your fan page or on the profile pages of Facebook users, you can capture data about the number of users who have:

• Added your application tab
• Added your application profile box to their profiles
• Added your application information section
• Bookmarked your application
• Subscribed to your application e-mails

You can also capture a variety of metrics for user activity involving your Facebook applications. These include the number of:

• Active users during the past 7 days
• Active users during the past 30 days
• Canvas page views. (The canvas page is the main page for your application.)
• Unique canvas page viewers And then, if you’re more technically minded, here are some more technical metrics:

1. Number of API (application programming interface) calls made.
2. Number of unique users on whose behalf your application made API calls.
3. Average HTTP request time for canvas pages.
4. Average FBML (Facebook Mark-up Language) render time for canvas pages.