Facebook hasbeen putting a bigeffort into growing Messenger as a bot platform this year. Nowthere are 34,000 of these botsin existence, built to automatically feed you news and entertainment, let you shop, and more expanding Messengers usebeyond simple chats with friends. And today, that strategy is getting a significant boost: Facebooksays it will now let developers trackbots on its free analytics platform, alongside ads and apps. At the same time, Facebookis also opening upits developer program, FbStart, to bot developers.
Both potentially give bot makersmore reasons to build and monitor how their new widgetsare working.
Josh Twist, a product manager for Facebook Messengers bot efforts, who is an Englishman based in Seattle but is in London today to debut the tools at a developer event, tells me that Facebook expanded the analytics and FbStart tools after a lot of requests from the developers.
Getting bot support for messenger is the most frequently requested feature from bot developers, he said. Thisshouldnt be too much of a surprise. Messenger may have over one billion users, but it remains to be seen whether bots will be a sticky and useful service for them in the longer term, or whether they are a flash in the pan.
Facebook already provided analyticsto other developers on its platform, and bots have seen a massivesurge of interest since they first made their debut earlier this year. That interest has not just come from users curious abouthow they work; developers are also very keen to see if bots really arethe next big thing.
Twist tells me that for now, the analytics will cover bots built just for Messenger. But given how bots are making their way to other communication platforms, from competing messaging appslike Vibers through to enterprise-focused platforms like Slack, dont be surprised if Facebook expands its botanalyticsto other platforms beyond Messenger.
It issomething we have talked about and havent ruled it out, he said. Its possible, absolutely, since we already support analytics for other platforms for apps. But right now wereprioritizingsupport for Messenger bots.
Analytics, of course, is an essential tool for a developer, both to be able to track how well something is working and other kids of feedback. Here Facebook says that features that will be included are reaches across mobile and desktop devices and measurement of customers journeys across apps and websites.
Developers also will be able toview reports on messages sent, messages received, and people who block or unblock your app. And they will also get access to anonymized data reports on bot demographics, which include details like age, gender, education, interests, country and language to figure out who is using your bot.
FbStart, meanwhile, currently has some 9,000 members whoget feedback from Facebook on their apps, ads and bots, as well as Facebook ads credits and other free tools frompartners like Amazon, Dropbox, and Stripe. If Facebook was looking at ways of swelling those ranks, tapping 34,000 developers could be one way of doing that.
Twist points out that while there are a lot of standalone bot developers coming to Facebook for the first time, there is a lot of crossover with other Facebook services like apps and ads.
Those who are leveraging these together for example using the recent ability to channel a person from a News Feed ad through to your Messenger experience will be able to look at the effectiveness of those efforts now, and make potentially more ad buys based on them.
