What Gets Measured, Gets Done

How To Create An Analytics Report For Social Media Performance 2019

In order to know what is working and what is not working, you’ll need to look at the analytics from your content and review it for performance trends. With this information, you can draw conclusions and make recommendations for optimization going forward to make sure you are spending your time on social media more effectively and efficiently as possible. 

You’ll need to establish on the front end what success looks like with your client and manage expectations for each month’s performance. For example, if you are creating brand new channel presences with no paid advertising or public relations support, then you’ll want to make sure the client knows that the first few months will be establishing presence, seeding content and getting comfortable with the brand message. 

Once you know what success looks like, you’ll need to decide what metrics to track for review each month and where that data will be coming from — for example, some of the data may need to come for the client. It is pretty important to have access to the website data if you are driving people to the website, data about email sign-ups if that is the call to action, sales information, store traffic, or other physical location interactions if success is related to any of those metrics. It is nearly impossible to know if your efforts are working if you don’t have the data on the backend. If the effort behind social media is general branding without any trackable calls-to-action, then performance can be solely measured on impressions delivered and engagements with the content. 

Here are the data points I recommend tracking by channel, by day (and sometimes by time), as a total, and percent change:

• Impressions

• Engagements

• Link Clicks

• Total Followers

• Email Opens/Clicks

• Website New Visitors

• Average Website Session Duration

• Website Traffic Sources

• Sales/Downloads, if relevant

With all the data pulled and in a format that you can review, contrast and compare, it is time to look for patterns, obvious dips and bumps in activity, and general performance. When reporting to a client, I like to create sections with the following information:

• Key Observations

• Optimization Recommendations

• Highest Performing Content

The key with analytics is to actually use the data and findings that you put together each month (or quarterly, or whatever you and your client have decided is right). Reference that information as you plan content for the next month. Ideally, your content starts to perform better each month as you continually optimize. That is, of course, until the channels change their algorithms and you have to start from scratch again. Just go ahead and expect this so you are not shocked when it happens. Because it will. 

Here are some of the tools I use to measure and report:

• Sprout Social

• Google Analytics

• Email Platform Analytics (Mailchimp, Constant Contact, ConvertKitetc.)

• Client-provided/specific data: sales, app downloads

• Google Sheets

• Keynote

• Venngage

Tracking and reporting may be one of those things you don’t think about when taking on a new social media client. But doing it can set you apart from others offering similar services and will ultimately improve the performance of your work, making you and the client look good!