Facebook Insights

The Facebook Insights Connector gives you access to the Facebook Insights API, providing Facebook page owners and Facebook platform developers with insight metrics around their content. Full details of the information the API provides can be found in the Facebook Graph API.

You must be the owner or an administrator of the Facebook page, application or domain. Insights data is only available for properties for which you are an administrator and there must also be at least 30 Likes for the page or Facebook object for Insights data to become available.

Ways to access your data

You must be the owner or an administrator of the Facebook page, application, or domain. For the Facebook page or object Insights data to become available, it must have at least 30 Likes and you must be an administrator.

There are a large number of Facebook Insights tables covering the four main object types:

• Pages
• Domains
• Applications
• Posts

The Facebook Insights Connector also categorizes the tables the same way. There are also additional categories like Realtime which shows all the tables in the four categories listed above that support realtime data. You can also load the full list of table names into QlikView and Qlik Sense by selecting the All Tables category and running the TableNames table. This table also has columns indicating which tables are processed in real time and which periods each table supports.

The Facebook Insights Connector is configured with all the tables listed in the Insights Metrics section of the Facebook Graph API.

Insight Metrics

Information on each of the parameters used in the tables can be found by hovering the mouse pointer over the ] icon next to each parameter title.

Obtaining the Fan Page ID

To obtain the Facebook Fan Page object ID of a page that you administer, which you will need to enter into this connector, browse to the page in Facebook.

If the Facebook page has a vanity URL, like www.facebook.com/chuckie, then enter the value chuckie into the Page ID text box. If the Facebook page URL has a numeric identifier then enter the number into the Page ID text box.

You should be able to find the ID of other Facebook object types using this technique or when viewing the built in Facebook Insights dashboard for the object.

Obtaining your Domain ID

If you are trying to get Insights for your domain you will need to enter the domain ID into QlikWeb Connectors. To locate the domain ID, browse to the domain Insights section of the Facebook website you are interested in. Copy the domain ID, which is after the xx_ in the browser address bar, and paste it into QlikWeb Connectors.

Obtaining your Application ID

If you are trying to get Insights for your application you will need to enter the Application ID into QlikWeb Connectors. Browse to the application Insights section of the Facebook website for the application you are interested in and copy the ID after the xx_ in the browser address bar into QlikWeb Connectors.

end_time

The end time is always returned based on midnight Pacific Time, for example:

2016-12-01T08:00:00+0000 or 2016-12-01T07:00:00+0000

In the example above, the end_time returned by the API is 00:00/midnight Pacific Time. It refers to the data for the day preceding this date, in the case of data with a period of day. A pacific_date column is included in the data output which you can use to plot your values against.

Extracting data using the Advanced category

If you cannot find the table you are looking for in QlikWeb Connectors but it is listed in the Insights Metrics section of the Facebook Graph API, you can go to the Advanced category, select CustomTable and enter the details for the table which will allow you to extract the data.

Insight Metrics

Troubleshooting

Empty white screen when trying to authenticate

If, when you try to authenticate with the connector, you get an empty white screen, try authenticating with this Graph API Explorer.

facebook for developer tools: select Graph API Explorer

Click the Get User Access Token option under the Get Token button in your browser. If you still get a white screen then this is not a Qlik Web Connectors issue but rather an issue with your system configuration.

Once you can authenticate successfully with the Facebook page from your browser you should also be able to authenticate with the connector.

Not Getting Token Expiry

If you find that, on authenticating with the connector, you are not seeing a token expiry date shown in the Qlik Web Connectors UI, locate the Facebook Insights Connector in your Facebook settings and delete it. Then try re-authenticating with the connector.