An Introduction to Analytics

Social media marketing isn’t all about blogging, tweeting, and posting on Facebook, although we at Salty Waffle do our fair share of that.  But it’s also about analyzing how effective those posts and tweets are. Salty Waffle uses analytics in a variety of different ways, from seeing how people respond to certain content we post, to how effective our ads are in converting visitors to customers. In fact, this is such an important part of our social media marketing, that we have a meeting everyday to discuss it. In case you’re a little scared by the term ‘analytics’ or feel you might be overwhelmed by a spreadsheet of numbers, don’t worry! Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be highlighting 3 user friendly and effective analytics platforms we use for analyzing data from Twitter, Facebook, and company websites.  The three analytic platforms that we use are Sprout Social for Twitter, Facebook Insights, and Google analytics for websites.  Before we get started with those though, you’ll need to learn a couple important analytics vocabulary words:

Visits – The number of visits to your website

Unique visitors – The number of individual (counted only once) visitors to your website over a selected time period

Pageviews – Total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are included.

Pages Per Visit – The average number of pages viewed during a visit to your website. Repeated views of a single page are included.

Time on Site – The average time duration a visitor spends on your website.

Bounce Rate – The percentage of single page visits.  (How many times a visitor left the site from the entrance page).

Organic Search- Search engine results listings that appear based on their relevance to the search term, rather than paid advertising.

Reach- The number of people who have seen anything associated with your Page over a given time period (includes Ads and Sponsored Stories)

Saw Your Page- People who saw content associated with your Page in their News feed

People Talking About This- Total number of unique people who created a story of any kind about your page or on your page. This includes page likes, wall posts, mentions, and any engagement with one of your posts.