App insights drop for all games on 14-15th Sept?

Question

I noticed that across all of my facebook apps there was a significant drop in users between 14th-15th September. After spending some time investigating any possible cause (as I had launched an update that day), and finding nothing, I looked on appdata.com and it seems that almost every game has this big drop on the same dates.

I have checked the blog and couldn't see anything obvious to say why this might be. Does anyone know the cause of this change in insights data? Or is this a bug?

Answer 1

They changed the way that the number of active users was calculated. According to here:

Facebook has changed the way it calculates the total monthly and daily active users (MAU and DAU) for apps on the social network, sending figures plummeting.

The adjustment means that users who choose not to authenticate after a permission dialog box is clicked, and those who visit an app but do not log in, will no longer be contribute towards active user counts.

As a result of the changes, some games have seen more than half of their previously reported user figures drop away (though these changes have made no difference to the actual traffic each game sees).

Answer 2

facebook changed how user's bookmarks appear on sept 13th, which meant that a lot of users that used to see your bookmark on the left side of their homepage no longer could. As of that date facebook seems to use way less space to list bookmarks, only showing bookmarks for apps you use a lot or have just used. The only way to counter this is to educate your users to set the bookmark for your app as a favorite, which gives that bookmark a permantent position (hopefully) forever in the top section of the left margin of their homepage.