It is an exciting prospect — you have just set up your social media accounts, website, and email marketing campaigns. People are interacting with your pages, clicking on your links, and opening your messages. Everything is working the way it should, with one exception: you don’t understand what the engagement analytics mean. You are lost in a sea of confusing numbers and words on the marketing dashboard, staring into an abyss of data that might be meaningless to you.
But there is a way to understand. Once you know the basics, it is so easy to comprehend the marketing dashboard — and don’t worry, Village Oak Creative is here to help you see it.
Why is it important?
Understanding your analytics will allow you to know how to approach your engagement in the future. It allows you a sense of what works and doesn’t. They are the key to knowing what you are doing right.
How to begin
Read the definitions listed below, and cross reference them with the names of the sections on your engagement analytics. Once you understand what the terms mean, go through the numbers and read them carefully. Make notes — keep tabs on your successes and your shortcomings.
Let’s start with the basics: what is an engagement on Facebook? An engagement is any action someone takes on your Facebook Page or one of your posts. Any time someone does anything involving your page, it is an engagement. There are many different subcategories of engagement.
Facebook total likes are the number of followers and page likes you gain over time. Facebook Ad Reach is the number of people who saw any content from your ad.
Facebook Audience Growth is the amount of new followers during a given time period. Facebook Total Reach is the number of people who saw any content from your page or about your page.
All of these tools can help you build your Facebook page, and decide what steps you need to take moving forward.
Instagram is much more simple. There are three subcategories of engagement on Instagram: followers, likes, and impressions.
Followers are the number of users who follow your account and can see, like, and comment on any media you post to your profile. Likes shows you the number of likes for all content during a given time period. Impressions are the number of times your content, whether a post or a story, was shown.
Easy, right?
Website
Websites look like a beast — there is a lot to see, but once you break it down, it is much easier to understand. Let’s start small, and get bigger.
Page views are the number of views of a page(s) on your site. Users are the number of visitors who initiated a session on your website.
The average time on a page is the average amount of time a user spends on a page. The number of sessions is the total number of visits to your site — including both new and repeat visits.
Let’s get a bit more complicated: bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave (“bounce”) rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site. Google Search Impressions are the number of times a link to your site is shown on Google.
Lastly, there is search terms average position — it is the relative ranking of the position of your link on Google, where 1 is the topmost position, 2 is the next position, and so on.
There you go! That’s all there is for websites. You’re starting to get the hang of this, I see.
Email marketing
Email marketing is all based on rates. First, there is the open rate: this measures the percentage rate at which emails are opened. Then, there is click rate. This measures the percentage rate at which links within an email are opened.
Lastly, there is bounce rate, or the percentage of email addresses that your campaign could not be delivered to. These are people who do not receive your email.
To conclude
See, that wasn’t hard, was it? Once you understand the vocabulary of analytics, the numbers make a lot more sense. Now you have the tools you need to successfully understand how people are engaging with your social media, emails, and website.
Looking for more tips, tricks, guides, and definitions? Check out Village Oak Creative’s other resources to learn more.