Understanding social data and analytics
Whatever data you are looking at whether website analytics, conversion tracking or social media insights, they will never be the same as anyone else’s.
Your results and insights are based on your website pages, your audience actions, your content and what you put online.
So, with that in mind, before you can start to track your data and find out what is working for you, you need to identify what it is you want to achieve, what are your marketing objectives?
Then the best thing to do is to set KPIs, which stands for Key Performance Indicators, they measure and prove how effectively a business is achieving a key objective. These KPIs are unique to you and your business. Your goals are different from anyone else's therefore your KPIs and their results are unique to you.
“Your data is unique to you and your content.”
Once you have your business goals and KPIs now to look at the data from all the content and marketing you have been doing.
Whether you are using Google Analytics for your website or direct within your social media insights, there are some specific metrics that you can track to show you how well your content is performing.
TRAFFIC is one the best data sources to monitor, and some deem this to be the most important metric as it enables everything that comes afterwards = engagement and conversions.
For example, look at your website traffic over a period, this will help you to identify if there are any peaks. Traffic increase = providing valuable content.
Using Google Analytics, traffic is shown to you by default as Users and Sessions. Users are unique visitors, counted only once and Sessions are the number of times a website visitor enters your website. Both metrics hold value to you.
New versus returning is another great metric to track. Yes, you want new people coming to you via your marketing but returning visitors are your warm and hot leads who like your content.
Time spent on site [also called Session Duration in Google Analytics] shows how long people are engaging with your site and content. This is a great tracking metric if you have blogs or long-form content as you will be able to see if visitors are spending several minutes or seconds on a page, showing the true value of your content.
Social Insights are just as important as your website analytics, and I recommend you use them together as a package to get a full understanding of your business growth and success.
For Instagram business and creator accounts you can access a lot of great data from within the app in Insights and now also using the Professional Dashboard.
From your Insights you can look at 7, 14, 30, and now up to 90 days of data giving you an overview of results and comparison stats or drill right down into what each post, story or IGTV has achieved for you. There are now also insights for Reels and Lives that will all appear within the Insights tab.
Your Facebook Business page holds a lot of data for you, also held in Insights. Post Clicks are a good metric to track as they show any time a Facebook user has interacted with your content. For example, they have expanded the text to read the whole post caption, clicked to view an image or played a video.
LinkedIn profile and Company posts now show some analytic data and if you are using Twitter, you must try out Twitter Analytics. There is a lot of data on your tweets and followers that can be very beneficial.
Engagement Rate is something to consider for all your social media activity. This data shows the average number of interactions your social media content receives per follower.
There is a little bit of maths involved –
total number of interactions of the content divided by the total number of followers x 100 = engagement rate %
But why is this important? It excludes follower numbers.
Engagement rate gives an honest assessment of the quality of your content.
If you have a low engagement rate, it is possible that you have gained a large following that is not your target customer. And if your engagement rate is high, you are smashing it, so keep going!
In summary
Depending on what your marketing objectives are and what you want to achieve from each of your social channels you can track comments, saves, reach, profile views, trending posts and much more.
The best data from your social media accounts will always come direct from the in-app insights. But you can also use free tools like Creator Studio and Tech.
