For years, Twitter has been a very tricky platform to measure marketing ROI on. No more! Earlier this summer, Twitter quietly rolled out a powerful analytics suite to complement their Twitter Ads dashboard. Not a Twitter advertiser? That’s OK – you can still access the analytics! Here’s a tour of the new analytics and how you can use them to maximize your social media marketing.
Twitter’s new analytics are available inside their Twitter Ads platform, so you’ll need to sign up for Twitter Ads at ads.twitter.com. You’ll have to put a credit card number in, but you don’t actually have to pay for ads to use the platform. Once you’re on the platform, get ready for a level of data and analytics for Twitter that up until now, you’ve only been able to dream about!
The analytics include several standard metrics like retweets and replies that you may have been able to get elsewhere in the past. What is really special about the new analytics though is that for the first time, impressions are available! And unlike Facebook where you often have to wait hours or days to get post metrics, Twitter’s are available in real time!
When you click into the analytics tab in the ads dashboard, you’ll be greeted with several charts showing data from the past 28 days, including impressions, engagement rate, retweets, link clicks, etc. Also, you’ll be able to see how all of your individual tweets have performed (clicking on the tweets gives more in-depth metrics).
This data is great for getting a quick snapshot of how you’re doing with Twitter, but wait, there’s more! All of Twitter’s analytics are exportable in Excel spreadsheets and that’s where the real data treasures are.
The exportable analytics include every possible data point about a given tweet you could possibly want, including time of day posted, impressions, and engagement measurements (retweets, replies, link clicks, etc.). Best of all, Twitter separates organic metrics from paid ones, so if you do advertise on Twitter, you can easily see how your ads are performing.
When a nonprofit client analyzed their Twitter metrics, they discovered huge differences between how tweets with images performed versus those without. In a campaign to drive donations, two tweets stood out: The text of the tweets was nearly identical, they were posted at similar times and they got the same amount of retweets. The difference was that one had an embedded image and one didn’t. The tweet with the image got five times more impressions than the tweet without.
There are all different ways to slice the data Twitter gives you and since it’s downloadable, you can really analyze every aspect of your performance on Twitter. Know what time gets you the most impressions? Wonder what type of tweets garner the most engagement? Now you can find out!
I’m a big fan of the “do it wrong quickly” approach that digital marketing allows. What does it mean to do it wrong quickly mean? It’s a concept my friend, and Biznology’s own, Mike Moran explains in his book. Basically, it’s about how the internet lets marketers experiment quickly and cheaply. If a campaign isn’t working out, you can find out in real time and then adjust the campaign mid-flight. With Twitter’s new analytics, you can do that more than ever before!
Use these new analytics to really boost your lead generation with Twitter!
