Experiences with Snowplow and Facebook Instant Articles?

For engineers
1

Hi guys,

First post, so go easy!

We’re looking at implementing Facebook Instant Articles on a client’s new site, and they have some documentation on how this works with common analytics providers - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instant-articles/ads-analytics

Has anyone experimented with Snowplow on Instant Articles? Do you merge/enrich your data with data from the Facebook APIs? (there are two specific FB Insights APIs for Instant Articles).

Any ideas or experiences will be appreciated.

Thanks
JP

2

Hi @jrpeck1989,

I can’t find any previous discussion of Facebook Instant Articles on Discourse or in our customer support system, so this is new to us too. Look forward to hearing any experiences from the community!

Alex

3

HI @jrpeck1989 - I’ve been talking to a couple of users and apparently you can embed Snowplow tracking in the instant articles, just like it’s your own web page you’re tracking.

Would be great to have users confirm that this works, as we haven’t had the opportunity to validate this ourselves.

Thanks!

Yali

4

You can do standard JS but it runs inside an iframe, so your JS won’t have access to most of the page variables if you’re relying on that. So things like dataLayer won’t be there. They do expose a “defined set of Instant Article data” (though they don’t define it, of course).

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instant-articles/analytics

Here’s how Adobe suggests you do it, for comparison:
https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/sc/implement/analytics-facebook-instant-articles.html

5

Thanks Simon,

Do we have a first cut on what those fields are? We can get started on a schema for Iglu Central…

6

We’ve integrated snowplow into IA for a few months now and the process seems rather seamless.

One thing to note: they fake-out the url so that any events appear to have originated at your canonical url rather than an IA url. We added an Instant Article context to differentiate from other events.

3 Likes
7

Thanks for sharing @sbonami

1 Like
8

Thanks for your answer! Do the Snowplow guys have a guide for sending contexts in IA pages?

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No we don’t @jrpeck1989 - would you be able to share something in this thread @sbonami? Would be great to add the context to Iglu Central too - PR welcome!

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We ended up grouping Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP into similar contexts to match the designs of our system, so I don’t think our context would be of any assistance. Sorry!