Do you really understand your visitors’ behavior on your Facebook Instant Articles pages in WordPress? Facebook Instant Articles delivers an incredibly fast reading experience for your visitors on Facebook.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to track Facebook Instant Articles in WordPress.
What is Facebook Instant Articles?
Facebook Instant Articles is an initiative by Facebook that allows publishers like you to distribute your posts on Facebook that ensures super-fast reading experience for your standard mobile web articles. For faster page rendering, Instant Articles loads a stripped-down version of your site in the Facebook mobile app.
If you’re looking to attract more visitors from Facebook, you should set up Instant Articles on your site.
According to Facebook, Instant Articles attract more traffic to your site because 70% of people are less likely to abandon your page. And people on slower connections read 20% more instant articles than mobile web articles.
You can learn how to set up Facebook Instant Articles in WordPress.
Tracking Facebook Instant Articles in WordPress
Instant Articles messes with the title of your pages. Due to the reason, if you set up tracking on Instant Articles natively, chances are Google Analytics can’t accurately identify the title of your individual pages.
How can you fix this issue and accurately track your Facebook Instant Articles in WordPress?
The easiest way to properly track your Instant Articles with Google Analytics is by using MonsterInsights.
Besides accurate tracking of your individual Instant Articles pages, you can also track the performance of your ads, outbound clicks and utilize other MonsterInsights features.
How to Add Google Analytics to Facebook Instant Articles
Note: This tutorial assumes that you’ve set up Instant Articles with the Instant Articles for WP plugin by Automattic.
The first thing you need to do is to install and activate MonsterInsights and connect it with your Google Analytics account. Learn how to properly connect MonsterInsights with Google Analytics.
In your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Insights » Addons and click Install under the MonsterInsights Facebook Instant Articles addon.
After the installation, the addon should auto-activate. It doesn’t, then go ahead and click the Activate button to make sure the addon is active and ready to use.
Now go to the settings page of Instant Articles for WP by clicking the Instant Articles menu in your admin panel.
In the Analytics section, you can find Google Analytics by MonsterInsights as third party integration. Click the checkbox to enable it and click Save Changes.
Congrats!
Now you can accurately track Facebook Instant Articles in Google Analytics.
How to View Instant Articles Traffic Report
Your regular Facebook traffic and Instant Articles traffic are shown together in Google Analytics. To get a report of all your Facebook traffic, navigate to Acquisition » All Traffic » Channels. In the Default Channel Grouping column, select Social.
Then, click on Facebook.
To find the pages visited by your Facebook traffic, you can click on the Secondary dimension dropdown and then choose Page under the Behavior tab. Make sure to analyze if enabling Instant Articles has increased your overall traffic from Facebook.
We hope this article helped you track Facebook Instant Articles Traffic in Google Analytics.
If you also want to offer a super-fast mobile browsing experience for your organic visitors from Google, make sure to set up Google AMP on your WordPress site. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more Google Analytics tutorials.