Shownotes
Key Takeaways Covered In The Podcast
- When using Facebook for Business you need to click the Insights tab in order to reach your analytics. This will show you the actions on your page, your page views, your page previews, your page likes, your post reach, your post engagement, your page responsiveness, your video views, your page followers and your orders.
- In most cases, post reach is a vanity metric as you could be reaching thousands of people but none of them may be engaging with your post. Instead, consider what your engagement is as a percentage of your overall reach.
- Facebook Insights can also give you an idea of what posts perform the best, giving you an insight into what kind of content you should be publishing regularly.
- In the top right-hand corner of Twitter, you will see an option to view your Twitter Analytics. Whilst Twitter Analytics are often incorrect, you can view your Twitter highlights, a summary of your month, how many Tweets you’ve done, your Tweet impressions, your profile visits, the number of mentions you have had and the number of new followers you have gained.
- When it comes to Instagram there are two ways to look at your insights. The first way is to tap on one of your posts and click ‘view insights’. This shows you how many people have liked it, how many comments you’ve had and how many people have saved it. It also shows any actions that have been taken from the post, where your post was discovered and whether anyone has visited your profile.
- The second way to use insights on Instagram is to click on the hamburger menu right hand side of your profile and the click ‘Insights’. The first section shows an overview of your content including feed posts, stories and paid promotions. The activity section shows who is visiting your profile and what they’re doing whilst they’re there and the final section shows an overview of your Audience. This includes their location, age range, their gender and when they are most active.
- You can view Instagram Story insights by swiping up on your own stories. It will show if they clicked your links, if they tapped on your stickers or if they exited your stories at a certain point.
- When it comes to Google Analytics you can use the audience overview to show you most of the information you need. You need to select a date range first, but the first thing you will see if a graph that will show your overall visits to your site. Under the graph you will be able to find your total website users, the new users to your website, your website sessions, the number of sessions per user, your page views, your average page to sessions, the average session duration and your bounce rate.
THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…
One of the biggest fears people have when pitching new clients is that they’re worried about rejection. There are no industry standards or ideal numbers when it comes to analytics for your business. Whilst you may have personal goals, it’s much better to focus on how you can improve, rather than what numbers everyone else has. Look at where you are today, see where you can improve and then go back in a month’s time to measure your progress.
Highlights You Simply Can’t Miss
- Using Facebook Insights – 06:25
- Using Twitter Analytics – 13:52
- Using Instagram Insights – 16:40
- Using Google Analytics – 23:00
- External Sites for Tracking – 30:50
Links to Resources Mentioned in Today’s Episode
Transcript below
Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast. How are you? Know what? I have just had the busiest few weeks. So much travelling speaking training and don’t get me wrong I love every minute of it. But sometimes it absolutely wears me out and it gets me so super tired so I have to be really careful to take care of myself and I don’t know about you but when I travel all myself care goes out the window. I am a very social person so when I’m away I really like to go out and see places and meet people. Normally have several glasses of wine or a few gin and tonics and like I said I don’t end up looking after myself very well. I don’t get to bed very early. I then do long days. And if you do a job where you’re having to present yourself it’s quite hard work and I know that sounds daft because I feel like I’m very genuine when you see me and hopefully if you’ve met me recently because I met some amazing people at Atomic Con 19 and a few podcast listeners which was awesome. So if you have met me then hopefully you think I am the same as I am here. But sometimes when you’re trying to be just on form all the time, it can be really really tiring. So I’m a little bit tired. I have to say recording this podcast and I’m trying to batch ahead because next week I’m off to Social Media Marketing World which is gonna be fabulous and wonderful and really good fun. But again it’s going to be full on. It’s going to be long days. Lots of learning, lots of meeting people, lots of catching up with people that I’ve had on the podcast, my friends. Hopefully, I’m going to get to see Amy and Pat and Rick and Jasmine and all those lovely people. So it’s gonna be a really good week. But it’s gonna be totally full on.
Of course by the time this podcast episode comes. I’m actually will be back from Social Media Marketing World. Sometimes it all gets very confusing. But anyway enough about me. How has your week been? And also how is the first three months of the year gone? Can anybody actually believe we’re through the first three months? Because I can’t. I don’t know where this time has gone but it’s gone way too quick. And even though I achieved some things that I wanted to and I have made progress on other things. Actually there is still things that I think “Okay I’ve not progressed as I should have done.” And also sometimes things just change. So you might have a plan and you might have a direction in which you think you’re going. And then something in your world or in the business or someone you meet or something someone said then makes you just readdress things and actually over the past few weeks I’ve really had this and you’ll know quite a few weeks ago on the podcast I said to you that I might be taking a slightly different direction not massive but I was going to be focusing the podcast more on all aspects of digital marketing and selling online rather than just a really specifically social media.
Now don’t worry I am still going to talk lots about social media. We still have some great guests coming up but also I want to... I want to see it with everything else because you know what that’s how I’ve always seen it. Social media is just one of the many tools that as marketers and business owners that we have in our tool belt in order to market our businesses. So I don’t know about you but hopefully you’ll agree with me that actually adding in these other elements make complete sense and hopefully is going to give you a better and bigger more rounded way to approach your own marketing and more skills, more tools, more tips, more strategies and hopefully you’re going to love it even more because I love the podcast.
I love doing it. I love hearing when you guys send me DMs or when you put things on insta story or you tweet me and you say cool stuff about the podcast. It really does help because sometimes you sit in a room which I’m doing now on my own wittering on myself so it can feel a little bit odd and lonely at times. But when I get those messages back it just makes me feel like, yes this is working and you guys are getting some real benefit from it. So thank you. Also while I’m talking about that is it terribly awful. If I ask it’s going to give me an iTunes review I would really appreciate that. It’s just that if you are on iTunes and you’re trying to move your way up the charts, one of the things that help is reviews. So if you are happy to go give me a five star review I would love you forever. Thank you so much.
Anyway on with today’s episode and enough of me wittering on. Now we’re at the end of this three months, aren’t we? So we’ve done first three months the year and I know we did a review at the end of 2018. If you haven’t done that review if you didn’t see it I’m gonna hook up to that episode in the show notes so you’ll find the show notes at w w w dot TERESA HEATH WAREING all one word no hyphen dot come forward slash fifty eight as in the numbers not the word and every episode’s exactly the same. If you’re listening to any episode anyone find the show notes, it’s always forward slash and the number of the episode but I’m going to link up to the previous episode that I did back in the end of 2013 where we reviewed our entire year. And even if you didn’t get a chance to do it then there’s nothing to say that you can’t go ahead and do it now or do it whenever you’re listening to this episode.
But what I wanted to focus this episode on is some of the analytics and the stats that I look at in my business to see how well my business is doing and I’m gonna talk you through, especially on social media what some of these things mean. So I’m going to talk you through the Facebook analytics and I’ll talk you through Twitter and Instagram. I’m also going to do a teeny bit of Google Analytics and just let you know the sorts of things that I look out for when I look at my own stats to see how well my business is doing. And I’m gonna explain to you what it all means. So you can work out whether actually your effort is having an effect on your own social media and your own traffic and your own marketing.
So hopefully this is going to be a really really good one for you today. And I often get questions around this so unready excited to dive in and explain all.
Okay we’re going to get started with Facebook and we’re going to be looking at the insights tab. So if you have a Facebook page which if you’re running a business and you’re using Facebook for business then you absolutely should have a Facebook page. But if you have a page you will see there is an insights tab and I am just going to go through the page summary in terms of what they’re tracking and what that means. Okay. So the first thing it shows me is actions on page. This is your call to action button which is underneath your cover photo on the main page. So it shows you how many people have clicked that button and taken the action you’re asking them to take now. Okay I should probably said something in the beginning as a prerequisite then I’m not going to give you ideal numbers because basically there is no ideal number. There is no standard, there is no level in which I can say you should be achieving this. The thing that you should always be tracking with your own stats and your own social media on your own website is can you improve it so it doesn’t matter where you’re starting. It doesn’t matter if you’re getting one like a month or you know 20 likes a day. It’s all about improving from the next step. So like I said there is no base level here. Do not say here thinking I am going to say you should have this number of likes or this number of impressions or whatever. It’s all about looking at where you are today, seeing what you can do to improve and then looking at where you are in a week or a month or six months. So it’s all about going forward and improving not about comparing yourself to someone else. So don’t do that.
Anyway. let me go back to where I was so like that actions on page. The number of people who have done the action underneath your cover photos of the call to action than the next one I’m going to go it’s a grid and I’m going from left to right and then down the next page views. So this is the number of people who have looked at your page. Now this can actually be quite an encouraging figure in the sense of you might find that you don’t have a whole lot of engagement but you might find that actually quite a few people have looked at your page they just haven’t chosen to interact with you for whatever reason and if they’ve looked at your page the chances are they’ve seen that big cover photo. And as I’ve mentioned lots times before you should be using that cover photo at the top of Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn in order to promote who you are and what you do so that people know instantly what you offer. So the page views is a really good one. The next one is page previews. Now what this will be is sometimes if someone comes up in your feed and you hover your mouse or your honor for works on your finger it actually but if you hover over their picture or their name it will bring up a little preview box of who they are. That’s what that is. So I’ll show you how many people have previewed this and also sorry these stats they default for the last seven days. You can turn it into the last 28 days as well.
Then the next one down is page likes and obviously that’s the number of people who’ve come and like to your page then post reach. That’s the number of people that have seen your posts. Now these could be multiple people or these can be some of the same people but it’s the number of people who have seen the posts that’s been put in front of them. Recommendations if anybody’s recommended you. That’s the next thing it just tells you how many people did that. The next one down is post engagement. Now reach an engagement that interesting because reach is a little bit of a vanity metric because you could reach thousands but if no one engages the wrong people. And it’s a waste of time. So in post engagements. That’s the key bit. You want to be able to see that for the number of people it’s reaching that you’re getting a good engagement. And I like to see the kind of percentage difference between them. So what kind of percentage people are engaging based on the number of reach I’ve had said that might be something that you want to track or keep an eye on because you’re going to be able to tell whether you’re targeting the right people and if they’re interested in what you’re actually putting out there.
The next thing is your page responsiveness. And this is based down to how responsive you are. Often comes down to things like Messenger and stuff like that. Not too much to worry about here. Obviously you want to try and be as responsive as you possibly can. But we’re all realistic and we all have lives to lead so don’t worry too much about the videos that’s the next one. I’ll tell you how many video views you’ve had in those last seven days and it’s a three second view. So even though it might seem you’ve had a few hundred video views and it doesn’t have to be of a video you’ve put up in the last seven days it could be people going back and watching old videos but it’s only telling you people who have watched past three seconds. So that’s something to bear in mind that it’s not necessarily really long views that you’re getting on those videos and then the next one down is page followers.
Now people ask me what the difference is between likes and follows. Now you can like a page and it shows up on your own profile and also it might recommend that page to some of your friends because you have liked it if you follow a page. It doesn’t show up in your likes. So it’s almost a little bit like you’re following it secretly which means you’re seeing their content but you’re not liking that page. And one of the things that’s really interesting about this is there’s a few different businesses and industries that actually this would probably work well for. So for instance I once did some training with a company that do a diet product and they were saying that they really struggled to get likes on their page and I kind of said I’m not surprised because who wants to be seen to be liking a page of a diet product. It’s not really the sort of thing what my friends and family to see even if I was looking at it. So I might follow it instead of liking it. So that could be the difference. Also you can like pages and not follow them. So obviously that will show up as alike but you’re not going to see any of their content and then the last one on this insights is orders. And obviously if you have a set up then you’ll see your orders but I don’t. So mine’s at zero. So also under the insights tab there’s loads of other things you can look at but I just wanted to give you an overview of those things what they are and obviously remind you again that this isn’t that you should be having a certain number. It’s purely a case of. Okay that’s interesting. That’s where we’re now today. And let’s see if I improve my content or do something different or if I start life videos then let’s see what effect that has on it. So this is a bit brief but hopefully that gives you an idea of the sort of things that I look at on Facebook also very quickly the other thing that I look at on Facebook is the types of posts that go down really well. So if you carry on scrolling down you’ll see the posts and how well people react to them. And that will give you a good insight as to what posts your audience like and therefore the idea is try and do more of those posts. Now obviously don’t flood it with just those posts but just try and do more of them because you’ll find that that helps increase your overall engagement on the page.
Okay. So let’s talk Twitter now. As you know I am a big Twitter fan. I love it. It’s where one of my biggest audiences are. However there’s something really wrong about their analytics. It often shows incorrect figures and it really drives me crazy. So if you’re on your Twitter profile and now I know how to do this on a desktop you’ll be able to do on a phone but I’m just on a desktop so I’ll explain that way. If you’re in a Twitter profile go to the top right where your little face is click on that and you’ll be able to click analytics and it’ll open up a new page and show you your analytics.
Now if you’ve never looked at them before I think if I remember rightly it was some time ago. You just have to have a click a button say yes turn them on however what should be wonderful isn’t because like I said inevitably the stats are wrong. So for instance just to give you an idea how wrong they are. My 28 day summary i.e. what I’ve done over the last 28 days it’s telling me I’ve done 10 tweets quite honestly I think I’ve done tend to it’s today. So this is absolutely wrong. But when it does work great. So for instance it gives you each month and it gives you the stats for each month. So first of all tell you your tweet highlights your top mentions and give you an example of a few of your tweets your actual tweets that you’ve done. And then on the right hand side it gives you a summary of the month. So it will tell you how many tweets you’ve done. It’ll tell you your tweets impressions so your impressions of very similar to reach in Facebook. And that’s how many times it’s been put into that feed. Again it can look lovely when you’ve got you know and I’ve had it some months where it’s like hundreds of thousands of impressions. But it’s the engagement. That’s the key thing. So like I said focus on the fact that even though impressions are grey you really really want the engagement.
So like I said the next thing it has to be impressions after that. This...
