A Beginner’s Guide To Social Media Stats Tracking

Craft Maker Pro » A Beginner’s Guide To Social Media Stats Tracking

Do you track your social media marketing efforts?

A Beginner’s Guide To Social Media Stats TrackingDo you feel lost when you’re looking at your statistics?

We feel good when vanity metrics go up, yet we may still feel quite clueless on an overall direction. I’ve been there before too!

Of course, a key to gaining meaning from your stats is to have access to these stats in the first place. You need a way to collect the data that you wish to analyze, which is why it’s nice that there are so many tools out there to help with sorting it all out. But the favourite of most sellers is Google Analytics.

Facebook

Facebook metrics can be overwhelming and most Facebook Insights terminology is still hazy for many of us.

As a marketer, you know that what can be measured can be managed (and improved). So even if it seems complex, you need to measure your Facebook Page’s performance.

Insights provide information about your Page’s performance such as demographic data about your audience and how people are responding to your posts.

To see your Page Insights, click Insights at the top of your Page. From here, you can view metrics about your Page by clicking the sections on the left (ex: Likes, Reach). To export your insights, click Export in the top-right corner.

In the Posts section of your Page Insights, you can see the following information about your Page posts:

  1. The number of people your post reached
  2. The number of people who clicked your post
  3. The number of people who reacted to, commented on or shared your post

If you publish a video, you can also see the total number of video views and more details about viewing behavior.

Instagram

Before we start talking about social media traffic, you should know that there is a kind of traffic that isn’t automatically tracked by Google. That is visits from mobile apps. As far as Google knows, these visitors just appear on your site and they don’t know how they got there. This means that if you have your URL in your Instagram profile, or if a link to your site is posted in a Facebook group, anyone coming over on their phone will NOT show up under “social” when you’re viewing your stats in Google.

You can use programs such as Iconosquare to track your Instagram stats, but you can’t use it to track your conversions – how many people moved over to your website from Instagram. So if you think you get a ton of traffic from Instagram, remember that it’s not showing where you think it is in your Google stats.

One way to get the information about clicks from Instagram to your site into Google Analytics is to set up a special page on your website that you only send people to when they’re coming from Instagram.

Create this page and make it your Instagram profile link (then don’t share it anywhere else, or you lose the specificity of the data).

Click Behavior on the left, then choose Site Content, then All Pages and search for that URL in Analytics.

Now you can see a report of just traffic to that page, and know that all those people came from Instagram. To be super double sure, you can hide that page from the search engine on your site, or hide it from all search engines (you’ll need some tech help to do this).

Pinterest

Pinterest’s original analytics tool only shared information about how users interact with the Pin It button installed on your website. Unfortunately, those stats couldn’t give you a complete picture of whether your overall Pinterest efforts were working.

The newest Analytics features give you access to quite a bit more data, such as stats on engagement beyond your Pin It button. Now you can track actions that originate from your Pinterest profile—including boards and the pins you share (whether the pins are from your own website or not).

To gain access to Pinterest’s new analytics, you must have a Pinterest business account. When that’s in place, head over to your analytics dashboard.

Your Pinterest Analytics dashboard shows an overview of the three main categories: Your Pinterest Profile, Your Audience and Activity From (Your Website). You can click on each category to see additional details and have a better idea of how your Pinterest efforts are paying off.

Go to Social Media Examiner to find out more more about Pinterest social media stats tracking.

So which social media metrics matter to you?

It’s been great to share a bit about the social media metrics and blog stats we find valuable here at Craft Maker Pro.

I’d love to hear which ones you use in your marketing strategies!

Gary Capps
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