Twitter is a great social media advertising platform that makes it quick and easy for people to engage with brands.
And Twitter has over 328 million active users.
So including it in your social media marketing makes sense. But once your ads are going, you get hit with a wave of analytics data. It can be tricky to sort through all the metrics and figure out how to use them. To help you navigate the sea of analytics data and optimize your Twitter campaigns, we’ve put together a quick collection of the most important metrics to track.
Before we start with specific metrics, here’s a quick primer on Twitter metrics in general…
Twitter metrics generally fall into two categories:
- Overview metrics. These metrics help you determine the overall success of your Twitter campaigns or the potential for your Twitter advertising.
- Tactical metrics. These metrics help you improve your Twitter ads and your strategy. If you’re using these metrics properly, your overview metrics should also improve.
Now, let’s get into the best Twitter metrics to track and how they can improve your social media advertising.
1. Impressions
Impressions is an overview metric. Any time your tweets appear in a person’s stream, that counts as an impression. The tricky thing about impressions is that just because your tweet showed up in someone’s stream, doesn’t mean they actually read it.
So impressions can be deceiving. Impressions tell you how many people your tweets could reach if 100 percent of your audience read them.
A better impressions metric shows that there’s more potential for your Twitter advertising. But it won’t tell you how well your tweets are working. It’s best to use this metric for perspective on your other metrics.
2. Engagement
Engagement is also an overview metric. All these actions count as engagements:
- Likes
- Shares
- Comments
- Video views
- Clicks
- Retweets
- Detail expands
All these are good for gauging whether or not people like what your brand is saying. However, comments and retweets carry a bit more weight. These engagements indicate that your audience finds value in your brand content.
3. Audience demographics
Audience demographics are tactical Twitter metrics. Audience is a particularly useful metric because it works in two ways:
- It tells you what kind of content will interest your audience.
- It tells you if you’re attracting the right audience for your business.
Twitter audience demographics metrics include:
- Interests
- Language
- Gender
- Location
This information will help you determine the best content for your future posts. Additionally, it’s valuable to compare your audience demographics to your ideal or most valuable customer segments to determine if you’re reaching the right people.
If you match your content to your audience, you should see a lift in your engagement metrics.
4. Video completion rate
Video completion rate is a tactical metric that’s hugely useful for improving your Twitter content and ads. Video completion rate simply tells you if your audience is watching your videos or skipping them.
This helps you adjust the overall content of your video ads. Your video completion rate will be low if your video content isn’t relevant to your audience’s interests.
But it’s also useful for optimizing the beginning of your videos. Typically, if your video ads open with good hooks, your video completion rate should go up.
5. Results
Results is another tactical metric. The results metric measures how many users are taking actions that align with your campaign objectives.
Analysing your results tells you how well your calls to action are working, how relevant your ads are to your audience’s interests and if your ads match your objectives.
However, if your results metric is low, the first thing to look at is your call to action.
The issue is usually one of two things:
-
- Your call to action simply needs to be revised.
- Your call to action may not match the content of your Twitter ads.
If your calls to action are really good, but your results still aren’t great, you may need to go back to your audience demographics and work on matching your content to your audience’s interests.
6. Cost per result
This is actually another overview metric. But it’s a bit more telling than impressions and engagement.
Cost per result shows you how effective your Twitter marketing budget is. Cost per result only gives you insight into your paid Twitter ads, since your organic reach is free.
However, cost per result is a great metric for evaluating the quality of your paid Twitter ads. If your cost per result is a bit too high, it’s a sign that you may need to go back to your tactical metrics and refine the details of your ads.
A good place to start with this process is your results metric. If you can get more results per ad, your cost per result should come down.
The best way to utilize Twitter metrics is to take a cyclical approach. The cycle looks like this:
- Decide which overview metric you’d like to improve.
- Use your tactical metrics to make one adjustment to your ads.
- Reevaluate your overview metrics to see if the change was effective.
- Choose another overview metric to improve,
You can repeat this cycle endlessly to continually improve your Twitter metrics and in turn get more sales. So bookmark this post, and come back anytime you need a refresher!
