Ultimate Breakdown of Twitter Analytics in 2024 (2024)

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If you currently use Twitter in your marketing efforts, or are thinking about it, you need to understand Twitter analytics.

Twitter analytics will help you understand your audience better, and thus helps you optimize your Twitter marketing efforts accordingly.

So if you want to see better results from your Twitter marketing, then keep reading for the ultimate breakdown of Twitter analytics.

Because today, we’re going to walk you through everything you need to know about Twitter analytics.

Maybe you didn’t even know Twitter had a built-in analytics platform available!

Or maybe you are aware of it, but you’re not super sure about how to use it yet.

Either way, we’re going to cover the important things you need to know to effectively utilize Twitter analytics.

Let’s get started!

Twitter Analytics: Account Home

So first, to get to our Twitter analytics, log in to Twitter, click the More… dropdown, and click Analytics.

This will take you to analytics.twitter.com, where you will land on your Account home, about which Twitter says:

“This dashboard features high-level statistics and is a gallery of your greatest hits.

We’ll spotlight your top-performing Tweets and introduce you to the influencers in your network.”

From there, we get a quick glance at the top of the last 28 days with:

• how many tweets have you published,
• your tweet impressions,
• your profile visits,
• your mentions, and
• your new followers

…as compared to the previous 28 days.

Now as a quick disclaimer before we continue on with the rest of the post:

We’re going to walk you through our Twitter analytics solely for the purpose of showing you how to navigate and interpret the metrics it gives you.

The numbers on the screen are not necessarily the goal numbers you should aim for.

It just doesn’t make as much sense for us to invest our time and resources into Twitter…

…when other platforms like Google and YouTube drive infinitely more leads for us.

But oppositely, Twitter does make sense for a lot of our clients! It just depends on the nature of your business and target audience.

So moving on, after we see those initial summary metrics, you’ll see tweet highlights for the current month we’re in, including the:

• top tweet that earned you the most impressions,
• top tweet mention from another account,
• top follower you gained based on how many followers they have, and
• top media tweet that earned you the most impressions.

So basically, these metrics show you at a glance what type of content performed the best for any given month.

As well as who your “biggest” follower is, and what mention of you got the most engagement.

So that’s the analytics account home page.

Twitter Analytics: Tweet Activity Dashboard (TAD)

If you click over to the Tweets tab, known as the Tweet Activity Dashboard (TAD), you’ll get a more extensive look into your Tweet analytics.

For this page, Twitter says:

“You’ll know exactly how many times people have seen, Retweeted, liked, and replied to each Tweet. You can also filter by Promoted-only Tweets.

You can adjust the date range and export the data as a .CSV file.”

Over in the top right corner is where you can adjust the date range of analytics you want to look at.

It automatically sets to the last 28 days.

But, for instance, you can change it to the last 2 or 3 months to see bigger picture patterns within your Twitter marketing.

The graph will change accordingly, based on the date range you have set, to show how many impressions your tweets received over that period.

Below that, you’ll see the impressions, engagements, and engagement rate for any and all of your tweets, specifically your:

• top tweets,
• tweets and replies, and
• promoted tweets.

This is again all within the date range you set at the top.

Now the first thing we want to do when looking at the top tweets on your Twitter analytics…

…is to filter the columns to show tweets in order by most engagement.

However, it won’t let you do that currently. It automatically filters everything by top impressions.

Impressions are the number of times users saw the tweet on Twitter.

So it’s important to note that it’s not the same as reach, which are individual people who saw your Tweet.

So for example, if we saw the same tweet two times, that would count as two impressions.

That’s why in our opinion, impressions are not as valuable of a metric as engagements are.

Engagement metrics include all clicks anywhere on the tweet, including clicks on the hashtags, links, avatar, username, and tweet expansion.

As well as the obvious engagement metrics of retweets, replies, likes, and follows.

So that’s why it’s a little bit of a bummer that you can’t filter by the metrics that you want to look at, and you’re forced to view things by top impressions.

But if you wanted to take the time to export this Twitter analytics information into an excel sheet, you could filter things the way you want to from there.

The engagement rate column is just Twitter doing the math for you.

They do this by dividing the amount of engagements you got on a tweet by the amount of impressions it received.

And then lastly, the charts on the right just break down your engagements into how many there were of:

• link clicks,
• link retweets without comments, and
• likes.

This page can help you keep a pulse on what content topics are resonating the most with your audience based on which tweets have the most engagements.

From there, it gives you a shortcut to clicking the “Promote” button, if you want to put advertising dollars behind a tweet to get more impressions.

Or, if you want to find out how to get more Twitter followers, then read this post next.

Twitter Analytics: Video Activity Dashboard (VAD)

So let’s move on to the next page. If you scroll back up to the top and click the More dropdown, you can click Videos.

Now if you don’t post videos, there’s probably not going to be much to look at on this page. Let’s take a look at the analytics here.

This page is called the Video Activity Dashboard (VAD), and Twitter says:

“This dashboard displays retention, view rate, and completion rate for all of your videos on Twitter.

You can also filter by promoted views on videos. You can adjust the date range and export the data as a .CSV file.”

So again, the option to adjust the date range is in the upper right corner, which will alter the graph at the top accordingly.

This graph shows how many views your videos received for the time period set.

And for us, it’s only showing organic views, because we don’t promote our tweets.

But if you do, that data would show here in your Twitter analytics as well.

Then if you scroll down, it shows your video views and completion rate for all videos or just promoted videos.

It says video views are the total number of times your video was viewed across all tweets, but it doesn’t specify what counts as a “view.”

Does that mean that someone could just watch it for 1 second and it counts as a view?

That was our first question when looking at this on our Twitter analytics: how many seconds does someone have to watch before it counts as a view?

So, we looked into it for you. Twitter Help says:

“The main Twitter video view metric is triggered when a user watches a video for at least 2 seconds and sees at least 50% of the video player in-view.”

The completion rate is the total number of completed views divided by the total number of video starts.

And then the Trends charts on the right break these numbers down a different way, showing you the total minutes viewed and your video retention rate.

Similar to the previous tweet activity screen…

…these columns will help you keep track of which topics in your video content are resonating the most with your target audience.

Together, both of these analytics pages should help guide you in deciding which content to make more of.

And also, what topics within your niche get the most response from your audience.

Now the other two options under the More dropdown menu are App Manager and Conversion tracking.

We’re not going to get into these too much because these get more into Twitter advertising.

But for the sake of this post, we’ll say that if you are running Twitter ads, these screens can give you some more insight into the campaigns you’re running.

As well as prompt you to set up your conversion tracking tag, if you haven’t already.

Final Takeaways

So that’s the walkthrough of Twitter analytics. Now you might be thinking, “Okay, now what?”

Well, these social media KPIs are meaningless if you don’t take them into account when making decisions about your Twitter marketing strategy.

Twitter says:

“Twitter Analytics shows you how your audience is responding to your content, what’s working, and what’s not.

Use this data to optimize your future Twitter campaigns and get better results.”

So if you don’t allow the data to guide your decision-making, there’s really no use in studying it.

Here’s a quick list of things that Twitter analytics could guide you in:

• What kind of content to create based on tweets and videos get the most engagement
• Which tweet to put more advertising dollars behind based on what has performed the best out of your promoted tweets so far
• What conversations your audience is having around your business
• What do they want to see from you based on the context of tweets where people are mentioning you
• Who are the possible influencer opportunities based on who your top followers are, and how many followers they have

By the way, we recently published a post on Twitter verification, so if it is something that interests you, go ahead and read it after this.

If you want to generate more results from your marketing, then be sure to check out our Twitter marketing services.

Or, you can also browse our other social media marketing services. See you on our website!