Twitter Revamps Analytics To Show Impressions & Engagement On Organic Tweets

Twitter gave its analytics dashboard a major upgrade today, offering advertisers a deeper look at how well their organic tweets are performing.

Users with access to the dashboard — advertisers, Twitter Card publishers and verified users — are now able to see how many times each of their tweets has been viewed on Twitter’s Android or iOS apps or on Twitter.com. Also available: an hour-by-hour impression breakdown for the first day of the tweet, a running 28-day total of impressions and other engagement stats on all tweets, and the ability to export data from up to 3,200 tweets (an increase from 500 in the former analytics tool).

Previously, Twitter only offered such detailed engagement data for paid tweets in its Promoted tweet program. Feedback about organic tweets in the old version of the analytics was limited mostly to how many retweets and favorites they received (with occasional signals that flagged tweets with an usually high number of clicks or other engagement).

Twitter analytics product manager Buster Benson explained in a blog post:

In addition to the number of impressions, Retweets and favorites your Tweet received, the dashboard gives a breakdown of how people are engaging with it. Just click on the Tweet you’re interested in and it will expand to show you more detail. For Tweets with links, for example, you’ll see link clicks; for Tweets with hashtags, you’ll see hashtag clicks; for Tweets with App Cards, you’ll see how many times people clicked to install your app or open it (if it’s already downloaded). And if you receive follows or profile views from a particular Tweet, you’ll see that too.

Here’s a sample screen shot of the tweet-level view:

Giving marketers access to more robust organic analytics can be seen as a catch-up move; Facebook has long offered similar data for page posts in its Insights dashboard. It also is a thinly veiled shot across Facebook’s bow, considering the marketers’ frustration about Facebook’s News Feed algorithm throttling organic reach.

As Benson wrote on Twitter’s Advertising blog: “On Twitter, nothing comes between your Tweets and your followers.”

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: As it turns out, something does come between your tweets and your followers — lots of other tweets or people not even looking for them. Twitter’s new impression stats actually suggest that most tweets might not be seen by someone’s followers, similar to what happens with Facebook. Our companion story explains this more: Just Like Facebook, Few See What Brands Share On Twitter, As Its New “Impressions” Stats Show.

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.