Twitter Analytics is a free web analytics tool offered by Twitter that allows you to measure, track, and optimize your Twitter performance to grow your profile’s impact and business through the social media platform.
Everyone involved with Twitter can access Twitter Analytics to see key metrics about their followers, tweets, conversions, and much more.
You can use Twitter Analytics dashboards to get an overview of your Twitter marketing efforts or to discover the metrics that drive your engagement on the platform.
Combined with other free social media marketing analytics tools such as Facebook Analytics, YouTube Analytics, or website analytics with Google Analytics, it can help performance tracking.
We will explore everything that Twitter Analytics offers for businesses, marketers, and everyone interested in growing their presence on Twitter.
Twitter’s solution for a social media marketing analytics tool makes it critical to understand how we perform on the platform and offer more detail from the audiences that regularly engage with us.
Learn why analytics matter in digital marketing.
Through using analytics to grow an online business, we need data from every source we engage. And if Twitter has a place in your digital marketing strategy to increase social media impact, then it’s a tool you will need.
In this article, we’ll explore
- What Twitter Analytics is
- How to use Twitter Analytics and where to get it
- Go through the Twitter Analytics dashboard
- The essential Twitter metrics you need,
- The use of the website tag and conversion tracking
- How it compares to other free social media analytics tools
How To Use Twitter Analytics and Where To Get it
When you’re on Twitter’s homepage, you have to click “more” on the bottom, above your profile picture. Clicking “more” will open the option for “Analytics.”
You can always access the tool by the URL.
You can also access your tweet activity, the video activity dashboards, and conversion tracking through the home dashboard.
In the activity dashboards, you can change, and select date ranges to display data that matters to you.
Note that you can also export data to CSV by tweet or by day for more in-depth analysis.
Next, let’s check what the home dashboard has to offer us, marketers, and businesses alike.
Twitter Analytics Dashboard
The first time you open the tool, and every time after it, the first two things you will see is the dashboard.
The first piece of data you’ll get from the dashboard is your monthly (a 28-day) summary of your activity.
Here you’ll see how many of:
- Tweets you published
- Impressions your tweets got
- Profile visits you got
- Mentions
Monthly Tweet Highlights
The dashboard’s main feature is the Tweet highlights’ inclusion, which breaks down essential Twitter metrics for each month, you’ve been active on the platform.
The Tweet Highlight shows you:
- Top Tweet
- Top media Tweet
- Top Mention
- Top Follower
The benefit of the tweet highlights is that you can quickly see what drove the best tweet, mention, follower, and how it impacted your Twitter marketing each month.
Closely keep an eye out for the highlights because it lets you understand how to get more performance each time you send a tweet.
Next to the highlights, you will also see the summary of the same month. It shows you the same metrics and performance as the 28-day summary at the beginning of the dashboard.
Through the highlights, you can navigate each top tweets metrics by clicking “view Tweet activity.” After which, it will show you the detailed metrics for the tweet you opened.
Tweet Activity Dashboard
Similar to the home dashboard, you will get a summary of your last 28-day performance. But you can play around with dates as you see fit. By clicking “Last 28-days”, you can set and select a date range to fit your needs or click the date-presets next to it.
While you can choose any date range of activity, the limit is that you can only see three months of performance at a time. Or 91 days.
And you will see everything that has to do something about your Twitter activity within the given dates.
The first thing you’ll see is a chart that displays daily activity for the given dates, and hovering over the dates, shows the performance of the day you hovered over.
Below the chart, you can choose to see data from:
- All the tweets
- Top Tweets
- Tweets and replies
- Promoted (ads)
No matter which of the four tabs you choose to have open, you will see three columns of data and metrics:
- Impressions
- Engagements
- Engagement Rate
All the data will change if you change the selected dates.
On the right of the Tweet activity dashboard, you will see the
- The average engagement you’ve gotten on the given dates.
- Daily frequency of engagement
- And the total amount of given engagement metrics (like link clicks)
Video Activity Dashboard
The video activity dashboards work the same way as the tweet activity dashboards but include metrics important to videos such as:
- Views
- Completion Rate
- Total minutes watched
- Retention
And you can choose it to show data from all videos or promoted videos.
Twitter Website Tag
The last menu item in Twitter Analytics is the website tag.
The Twitter website tag is a code snippet installed on your website that allows you to track conversions and user behavior from Twitter.
Installing the website tag is essential if you want to discover how Twitter’s traffic engages and converts on your website. And especially crucial if you’re advertising on Twitter.
For increasing the results of Twitter ads, you will need the website tag.
It allows you to:
- Optimize advertising towards website conversions such as sales
- Measure advertising returns (ROI)
- Create behavior-based audiences to tailor your advertising to suit more unique audiences
- Track website events that you care about
Like the Facebook Pixel, it deepens your understanding of user behavior on your website to increase its performance and increase Twitter marketing performance.
You can generate the website tag on this page, and through following the instruction, get it installed on your website.
And after a while, you can learn more about your user behavior and start optimizing Twitter ads by accessing the main menu tab.
The Twitter Metrics Explained
All the metrics you’ll find under Twitter Analytics are tweet engagement metrics or general profile related metrics.
Let’s see what each metric shows us about our Twitter marketing performance.
Tweets
Tweets are the number of tweets you published in the selected time frame.
Tweet Impressions / Organic Impressions
Tweet impressions metric measures how many impressions you got on the selected dates and effectively shows you how many people saw your tweets.
Impressions are one of the main metrics you need to follow and optimize as it directly shows you the reach you can achieve.
In Twitter Analytics, you can see tweet impressions for all tweets combined and for every tweet individually.
Profile Visits / Profile Click
The metric profile visits measure the people going to your profile. And Profile click measures how many times people click on your profile name, @handle, or profile photo from a tweet.
Mentions
A mention in Twitter Analytics can be a retweet or a direct mention of your @handle in a tweet.
For tracking brand mentions more deeply, you will need to go beyond what the tool can offer you with an additional tool such as Sproutsocial.
You can also use the mentions metric to see whether influencers are engaging with your tweets.
Followers
The follower metric counts the number of followers you have or have gained in the selected period.
Next, let’s look at the engagement metrics that are more crucial when understanding what works in your Twitter strategy and what doesn’t.
Tweet Engagement Metrics and Total Engagement
The more engagement you get from your tweets, the more results you can drive from your Twitter marketing efforts. If you don’t get alot of impressions, it should be the first goal and then optimize engagement.
And a higher engagement helps your tweets to reach new audiences faster, growing its organic potential.
The total engagement metric combines all of the tweet engagement metrics into one digestible number for ease of tracking engagement across multiple tweets.
However, you will need to understand what types of engagement metrics you want to dive into more from tweets.
For example, if you want to optimize for reach, retweets are more critical than link clicks. But link clicks are crucial if you’re optimizing for website events such as sales.
Likes
Likes -metric counts every like your tweet received.
Retweets
Retweets measures every retweet your published tweets get.
Retweets are essential to keep growing your organic presence on Twitter as the more retweets you get, the more your tweets get exposure from potentially new sources of audiences, increasing your reach and impressions.
Link Clicks
Link clicks measure how many times people clicked on the link on your tweets.
The metric is only available if your tweet had a link and engagement toward that link. Link clicks are crucial for measuring when actively trying to gain traffic toward a website or a landing page.
Twitter Analytics doesn’t calculate a clickthrough rate (CTR) for you, but you get it by dividing the link clicks you got by the impressions you got.
For example, a high CTR indicates that your tweet and audience matches in a way that produces clicks to links. But a low CTR might show low interest in clicking, whether that’s offtopic to the audience, or you didn’t give a reason for the click in the first place.
Detail Expands
Every time someone clicks your tweet, or its image, Twitter counts it as a detailed expansion.
The metrics tell you whether people feel the need to engage with your tweet further: the more detail expands a tweet gets, usually, the more other engagement types you will receive.
Replies
The reply-metrics follows every reply your tweet gets, and you can consider replies on Twitter as direct engagement.
Replies also tend to grow your initial reach as more people engage directly with your tweets. And if a conversation pursues, your chances of increasing reach increases.
Media Engagements
Media engagement metrics measure every action from people toward images, videos, GIFs, and more that you publish.
But for videos on Twitter, there are additional metrics you should consider if videos are in use in your social media strategy.
Twitter Video Analytics and Metrics
You can find the Twitter video metrics within the video activity dashboard, which we covered earlier.
While there are fewer video metrics that you need to be aware of compared to YouTube Analytics, they are still crucial for improving video performance as a content type on Twitter.
Video Views
Video views measure how many times people saw your video in the selected time frame.
Completion Rate
The completion rate metric calculates how many people completed the whole video compared to started watching a video.
Completion rate by itself is an essential metric for optimizing your videos for increased consumption and engagement.
For example, if people are not watching until the end of your video, you might want to start changing your video in a way that increases the completion rate.
Video Retention
Video retention is similar to the completion rate but measures the drop-off points more accurately when people stop watching your videos.
And if you’re optimizing for conversions, understanding where your audience drop-offs during the video help you make sure that your audience always sees the offer you’re offering.
Optimizing your videos using the video retention metric helps you pinpoint exactly why your audience leaves your videos before it’s completion.
For example, your audience always drops offs in the middle because of what you do in the video. With the metric, you pinpoint and optimize the part where the people leave from the video.
Watch Time
The watch time metric calculates how much time your audience spent watching your videos in minutes.
What Can I Do With Twitter Analytics?
As web analytics is crucial in digital marketing and its strategies to enable growth within the marketing channel, the tool’s data is beneficial for marketers looking to expand Twitter’s use in their digital marketing strategies.
First of all, the obvious. The more data you have from your tweets, the better tweets you can create and publish. As you get data from every tweet you made in the past; you can easily find the main reasons why a singular tweet worked better than the rest.
By improving engagement every time, you’ll get more from marketing with Twitter. And as a social platform, it’s all about harnessing a critical mass that can expand beyond your initial reach, which is why trying to get more from each tweet increases the chances of virality.
And data is the tool you use to increase the virality of your tweets.
Seek out to understand
- Whether your audience is growing
- What type of content and style work best
- When should a tweet go live?
- How does Twitter marketing perform against other social media platforms in your content distribution strategy?
- Ensure you’re gaining results from ads and compare to organic growth to see which ones grant a better ROI.
- What Twitter metrics matter most to your business (For example, High engagement vs. higher reach)
- Relationship between mentions and growth
- Do new followers engage with your tweets the same way as old followers?
- Can you further monetize Twitter activity?
Conclusion
Twitter Analytics is a handy tool to measure your Twitter marketing performance, whether you’re growing your organic reach on the platform or growing an online business elsewhere.
As it’s a free tool that helps figuring out whether Twitter marketing is the right move for your business, there’s nothing wrong with using it.
While it lacks many features for deeper analysis, such as audience data, for example, in most cases, Twitter won’t be your only channel in your social media marketing strategy. Therefore, you can use data from other sources to help you seek organic social media growth through audiences.
But acquiring the basic Twitter metrics for your marketing analysis, the tool provides everything you need to know about how Twitter impacts your business.