Facebook has been putting a big effort into growing Messenger as a bot platform this year. Now there are 34,000 of these bots in existence, built to automatically feed you news and entertainment, let you shop, and more — expanding Messenger’s use beyond simple chats with friends. And today, that strategy is getting a significant boost: Facebook says it will now let developers track bots on its free analytics platform, alongside ads and apps. At the same time, Facebook is also opening up its developer program, FbStart, to bot developers.
Both potentially give bot makers more reasons to build and monitor how their new widgets are working.
Facebook already provided analytics to other developers on its platform, and bots have seen a massive surge of interest since they first made their debut earlier this year. That interest has not just come from users curious about how they work; developers are also very keen to see if bots really are the next big thing.
Analytics, of course, is an essential tool for a developer, both to be able to track how well something is working and other kinds 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.
FbStart, meanwhile, currently has some 9,000 members who get feedback from Facebook on their apps, ads and bots, as well as Facebook ads credits and other free tools from partners 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.
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.
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