Facebook introduced the Messenger platform, which enables developers to build chatbots, at the F8 developer conference earlier this year. Over the past six months, a vast majority of business and developers have adopted the platform and built more than 34,000 bots to empower their business and engage with people.
Today, you have the option to not only choose a fashion dress, grocery, shoes, or anything within the chat window but also pay for it using your debit card or PayPal right then and there. And now, Facebook is building upon this tremendous success to fulfill the devs request and extending access to two new resources — Analytics & FbStart Program — for the benefit of the botting community.
A month post the launch of the platform, Messenger Product Head Stan Chudnovsky had hinted the imminent addition of analytics that’ll enable developers to track the engagement, user retention and prioritization. Fast forward six months, Messenger Platform has become the first analytics solutions for chatbots and will provide developers access to anonymized data reports on demographics including age, gender, education, interests, country and much more.
Also, developers will have access to App Events API which can be used to log custom events, such as transfer of chat to human agents for a travel business, links clicks for a publisher, and so on.
Commenting on the addition of free analytics tools to the bot platform, Sridharan Ramanathan, Software Engineer at Facebook, says,
With this new free tool, you’ll be able to view reports on messages sent, messages received, and people who block or unblock your app — without having to add additional code.
For bots associated with multiple Pages, you’ll be able to filter results at the page-level to view analytics for a specific Page.
In addition, the social media behemoth is extending its FbStart Program, which enables the developers to receive ad credits, a free package of tools and services worth $80,000 and year-round support from product experts, an exclusive community of global startups, to chatbot developers on the Messenger platform.
Beginning today, Messenger Platform developers and businesses can apply for FbStart, Facebook’s global program to help early stage mobile startups build & grow their apps,
reads the official blog post.
