We have news regarding the time reference of your KPI values. From now on we will give you the numbers for the end of your chosen time period.
Facebook API – this is how we get our data
Up until now, we gave you the values in the same way we got them through the Facebook API. Retrieving, for example, the number of fans of a Facebook Page for a Tuesday, we got the numbers of Tuesday at 12 am. It is a bit misleading, of course, to call these values “the numbers of Tuesday”, as Tuesday has barely just begun. A viral hit on that Tuesday, resulting in an increase of fans by 1000, would therefore not be included in the value.
So far we managed this inconvenience by showing the 12-am-values as the values of the previous day. That is a good solution when working with daily numbers. However, it is getting more difficult when you are looking at longer time periods for an analysis. So we decided to always take the end of a set time period as the reference time for any numbers.
Reasons for the change
Why change now? For one, Facebook shows users the values of the end of a time period in the Facebook Insights as well (other than delivered through the API). So it happened that our users sometimes got confused because of different numbers when comparing the stats of Facebook and Fanpage Karma. Both values were correct, just from different instances. We believe that unifying those values will ease your work.
Weekly and monthly values
Another reason for the adaption is that, in addition to daily values, you can now display weekly and monthly values in your graphs. Therefore it makes sense to display the numbers of the end of a time frame. Labeling the number of fans, for example, that a Facebook Page had at the beginning of the day of 1st March as the “March-value” of the page seems counterintuitive. Hands, if you request the KPIs of a certain month in Fanpage Karma, you will now get the numbers of the last day of that month. In our example, that means the number of fans of the night of 31st March.
We hope that you like this change and are excited to hear your feedback about it. All alterations are online for all users with immediate effect. Please visit us for a free 14-day-trial on www.fanpagekarma.com.