Some basic metrics of analytics.

There is a lot of data that we could analyze on digital marketing. And often we focus on vanity metrics and forget the important metrics.

In this post we focus on 5 metrics that are basics for every analysis that want to do.

Reach

The definition of reach is the number of people who see your post on social media. But it´s important to consider that this metric is estimated. It isn’t an accurate number and we have to use it only for statistical analysis.

Impressions 

One impression is a visualization of a message, post, banner, or online asset. If you see a banner on a site, that counts as an impression. In this metric, there isn’t any interaction.

Interactions

Any action that the user does is an interaction. Likes, shares, comments, link clicks are interactions that we use to measure the engagement of users. 

Engagement rate 

This rate measures how engaged your audience is. Engagement rate is calculated dividing the total of interactions by the total of impressions. Some people use reach instead of impressions. And the number is expressed as a rate (%). For example, if a post receive 10 likes, 2 comments, 3 shares and is seen 1500 times, the engagement rate is 1% (15 interactions / 1500 impressions)

Frequency

This is one of the most underestimated metrics. Frequency is the average number of times a user views an item. And it is calculated dividing impressions by reach. It´s used to measure awareness and ad fatigue on digital actions. If a post had 1000 impressions and reach 500 users, the frequency is 2.0, which is the same as saying that each user saw the post twice on average.

Conclusion

I think that these are the first metrics to analyze in every digital action. And answer this basics questions:

• Are the digital actions been seeing? (Check impressions and reach)
• Are the actions attracting attention? (Check interactions and engagement rate)
• Do people see the messages enough or too often? (Check frequency)

What do you think?

In the next posts, I’ll talk about other metrics linked with different objectives and actions.