So, it was snowing in Houston today. My sister texted a photo full of snow at 6:30 am–a neighborhood once covered in Harvey now covered in snowflakes.

Just finished my analytics reports. Not sure how many of you use Google Analytics. It has changed a lot since I first started using it back in the good old days. Analytics is the favorite aspects of my job, probably because I like using Excel and running calculations.

Analytics are an important part of of monitoring a site to ensure that you are still on target and achieving your goals. Benchmarking–before and after shots prior to a launch–will help you better tell your success stories.

Google Analytics

I use GA to track web site and blog traffic, looking at visitors, sessions and pageviews over time. I’m able to tell what countries are viewing the site, what language they speak and even their age.

For social media, I usually prefer to go straight to the source. There are several tools that are available to help with this, like HootSuite, but I really do prefer digging through the data.

Why analytics?

Twitter analytics

Twitter Analytics, I think, does the best job of providing user analytics. Facebook comes in next, with LinkedIn next.

If you aren’t aware, Twitter provides every user with analytics on their account’s performance.

To access,  click on your Twitter profile pic and select analytics.

Twitter analytics top mentions

The Twitter Analytics landing page for your analytics page will display a monthly summary, in reverse chronological order, of your top tweet, follower, mention and media tweet. It also shows the total number of tweets, profile visits, followers, impressions and mentions for the month.

Twitter activity analytics

Behind sub pages include a full analysis of tweets, your account’s audience, events, conversion tracking and, soon, video analytics.
You can export all the metrics from your Twitter analytics, which provides a full list of all your tweets, the number of impressions, engagements and the engagement rate. You can download your Twitter data for a day, month, or a specific data range.

Twitter audience analytics

Your audience analytics will give you an idea of who is reading your tweets. I’m pleased to see that I am followed by whom I intended to be  followed: techie nerds, both male and female.
Analytics reports are like checking your pulse. You want to make sure your sites are still up and running.