YC-Funded PageLever Offers Deeper Insight Into Facebook Analytics

Facebook may have droves of publishers, brands, celebrities, and other major entities using Facebook Pages, but its internal analytics product — Insights — still leaves a lot to be desired. Now Y Combinator-funded startup PageLever wants to give Pages with a large number of fans (over 10,000) tools that can help them better figure out exactly what they should be sharing with their fans.

Cofounder Jeff Widman, who was an intern at TechCrunch years ago, says that the service has been operating quietly since January as it’s ramped up its feature-set. And it’s also landed some notable customers, including YouTube, Mint, and Kayak.com.

One of PageLever’s key features is the ability to track how a given update on a Facebook Page fares over time — did that status update about a new deal fade quickly, or were people still commenting on it a day after it was posted? PageLevel will analyze the data and produce an ‘engagement timeline’, so you can easily track which posts had staying power.

Unfortunately Facebook only gives PageLever intermittent data when it comes to tracking how widely these posts have been distributed, so those timelines will be a little choppy. But they’re still better than nothing.

Another key feature: PageLever will let you analyze which status updates prompted your users to ‘unlike’ your page. PageLevel will also let you see how many people a Page’s updates are reaching, rather than just the number of impressions (some people see many updates, others none).

The service is available with plans beginning at $34 per month for brands with 5 pages and up to 50,000 fans and scaling up to $94 a month (which gets you support for up to 5 million fans, as well as multiple user accounts). Plans for brands with even larger fanbases are available as well.

Of course, Facebook could eventually decide that it wants to offer all of these features itself, free of charge. But Widman believes that even if that happens, Facebook will keep its API ‘ahead’ of the products it has shipped itself, giving third parties the ability to make their own products even better. We’ll see.

But, Facebook itself aside, PageLevel is also going to be competing with other analytics products, like Wildfire, AllFacebook Stats, and Involver.