Analysing your social media metrics with Snoobi Analytics

What is social media analytics
Social media analytics means collecting and analysing data from social media networks and other sources, assisting you in your social media strategy and optimizing engagement around your organic and paid social media efforts. In this article we go into detail on what can be analysed with Snoobi.

Social media analytics requires the right approach

Despite being a key element in measuring performance and success, true social media analytics still needs the right approach. Many organizations are failing to take advantage of all metrics, using only native social media-platform provided tools that show shallow performance metrics for each of their channels separately. They miss out on a multitude of more in-depth metrics in addition to all of the data points and insights that can be derived from standard web analytics provided by Snoobi Analytics.

What data and metrics can be analysed

Let's take an example for Facebook.  There are a few possible views on website traffic for Facebook analytics. Bear in mind that metrics and analytics from Facebook may well differ from the metrics in Snoobi since different methods are used.

1. Direct clicks from Facebook, originating from posts, articles, or your organizations' Facebook page. 
   • Clicks can either be organic ('free') or from your Facebook advertising
   • Clicks can be complete with utm-coding to recognize campaigns
   • All clicks from Facebook contain the 'fbclid' parameter as part of the url. The 'fbclid' parameter that you are seeing in the Snoobi page- or url panel is the parameter which Facebook is adding to outbound links shared on Facebook or Instagram. 
2. Forwarded clicks, when someone shared the link from a Facebook post and the receiver of that link clicked the link. Then the source of that click may no longer be Facebook, but you may want to consider taking these into account for your metrics as well. They may be 'second hand clicks', but still be valuable as these originated from your Facebook presence.

What metric are visible in Snoobi? (Traffic source view)

There are a few locations where metrics about traffic from social media (Facebook in this example) are visible in Snoobi for further analysis.

1. From Web Analytics | Overview
   1. In this panel the metrics for all social media can be found. However if you are also using utm_ advertising codes to track clicks, then these will be bundled in the 'Advertising' category, so 'Social Media' will not be a good metrics to base actions or conclusions on as it will only show clicks from social media without advertising codes. In a future version of Snoobi this 'Advertising' metric may be removed as it can be confusing
      
      In this example we only see 0,86% for social media, while the actual percentage of traffic coming from Facebook (or Instagram) is a lot higher as we can see in the next analytics panel.
      
2. From Web Analytics | Entry Methods | Social Media
   1. In this view, we can see more than 26% of visits originated from Facebook or Instagram.
       
   2. This panel in Snoobi also allows us to see important metrics such as bounce rate and average number of pages and duration of the visit.
3. From Web Analytics | Advertising | Advertising Media
   1. If utm_coding was used then all elements from these codes can also view in Snoobi, for instance:

In all panels you can also analyse specific dates and times, so you are able to see how soon after you posted a specific article or other element the clicks to your website started!

What metric are visible in Snoobi? (destination view)

While these generic metrics are good to analyse your general social media performance, you need to go into some more detail if you want to analyse the performance of a specific post of page.

To analyse a specific post it's important to add the utm_ advertising codes to uniquely identify the link from that post. Then the Web Analytics | Advertising | Advertisements panel will provide general metrics for that advertising code. 

And if you want to analyse traffic from social media to a specific page, you will need to use the Snoobi segmenting feature. Here is an example where the landing page was set to a specific page:
 

The same panel Web Analytics | Advertising | Advertisement provides the details for all visits where this specific page was the landingspage:

The conclusion is that there are several locations in Snoobi where you can analyze your social media traffic. We will be happy to provide you quick (and free) advise on where to find what data or we can offer a more extensive training or advisory.

Please contact us for more information.