Social Media Analytic Phrases You Need to Know

If you are looking into social media analytics for your business accounts, then you are probably seeing words and phrases like “account impressions,” “account reaches,” “audience engagement,” “click-through-rates,” and “conversions.” All of this information can seem overwhelming, and quite confusing to someone who is just dipping their toe into the social media market. Social media platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook, provide these insights to help people, much like yourself, track their performance on social media. Using social media analytics can help you gain a better understanding of what audience demographic is interacting you’re your posts the most, or what kinds of content gets the most engagement on your social media accounts. However, if you can’t understand what these terms and phrases mean, then the data won’t be very helpful.

Keep reading for a quick and easy guide to help you understand all the terms and phrases on your professional social media dashboard.

The first, and arguably most important, thing to delineate is the difference between impressions and reaches. These two terms are very similar, but grasping their slight differences will help you to understand how they impact post performance.

Impressions equate to the number of times your content is displayed on a user’s feed. With impressions, it does not matter if the post was liked, or even seen. Users do not necessarily have to see a post for it to count as an impression. An analytic report will still count an impression even if an account did not interact with or view it.

Reaches, on the other hand, are slightly different than impressions. A reach equates to the number of organic accounts, or users, who saw your posted content. In theory, all impressions could be \”reaches\”, but not all reaches count as impressions. Reaches are more important to measure because that number will show you how many accounts saw your content.

Audience engagement is another important term to understand when tracking social media metrics.  It may be similar to the definitions of impressions and reaches, however, there is one definitive quality that sets it apart. Audience engagement is one step above a reach as it measures the amount of people that have physically interacted with your content, as opposed to just viewing it on their feed. Audience engagement may include liking a post, sharing a post, saving a post, or commenting on a post.

Understanding “click-through-rates,” or CTRs, will help you track the rate at which people are taking action with the advertising campaigns you run. Google Ads analytics measure CTRs to show you exactly how many people are seeing your ad and clicking the call-to-action button you provide. For example, let’s say you run a Google ad campaign that provides a phone number to your office to book an appointment. If that ad gets 673 impressions and 17 people click on that ad and follow the call-to-action by calling your office number and booking an appointment, that advertisement’s CTR would be 2.53%.

One final term that will be helpful to understand is conversions. Conversions are very similar to CTRs. However, instead of measuring this result through a percentage, like CTRs do, conversions measure the rate at which a person interacts with your advertisement through quantitative numbers. Conversions measure the exact amount of people that interact with your ad. For example, a person that sees your ad, clicks on it, and follows the call-to-action- such as dialing a provided phone number and booking an appointment- would be counted as one conversion.

All of these terms and their correlating definitions may sound quite similar, but understanding their slight differences will help you track your metrics on social media. If you found this blog helpful, make sure to take a look at other posts for social media marketing tips!