Twitter has been criticized a lot by marketers for lacking native analytics tools. Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn do offer some form of analytics (think Facebook Insights) that help marketers gain insights into their engagement metrics and follower demographics, but until recently Twitter lacked such essential tool. Not anymore!

Those of you using promoted products from Twitter, such as Promoted Accounts or Promoted Tweets might have already spotted the analytics section in their Twitter Ads dashboard (if you don’t intend to use promoted products then register at http://analytics.twitter.com/ for the sake of getting access to the analytics tool).

At the moment, native Twitter analytics tool is split into three sections:

• Timeline Activity: metrics on the number of mentions, follows and unfollows on the account level, as well as other engagement metrics (favorites, retweets, replies) on individual tweet level
• Followers: a comprehensive insight into the demographics of your followers, such as gender, location and interests, as well as the the overview of the follower growth over time
• Websites: an insight into content sharing (meaning people tweeting links to your website by clicking “Tweet This” button) such as the number and content of tweets, as well as clicks the shared links generated.

Out of the above, we find the “Followers” section as the most compelling. There are plenty of third-party tools for tracking engagement metrics, such as the number of followers and mentons; however, most of them lacked a comprehensive insights into the demographics of your followers. Let’s take a quick look at this section:

As mentioned above, you can see a breakdown of your followers by location, gender and interests. Additionally, you can click on any of the metrics to filter the view. For instance, if you’re interested in the demographics of US followers, click on “USA” area in the “Location” chart and the whole dashboard will provide the metrics for US followers only:

Similar filtering can be applied to any gender and interests metrics. Pretty cool, right?

Hope this was helpful and let us know in the comments if you want a deeper insights into Twitter Analytics.

If you are a user of Google Analytics, you should be aware of one of the most brilliant features this web-analytics suite provides, custom dashboards. Today, we decided to share a custom dashboard that should help you track social media traffic for your website.

The dashboard, which you can add to any of your Google Analytics accounts, will help you track visits, unique visitors, average time on page and bounce rate for the major social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+. Here’s how it looks for our own website:

If you find this dashboard useful, fee free to add it to your Google Analytics setup, by logging in to your Google Analytics and pasting the below URL into the web browser.

https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=__BqhtIkSCG7XCZuZ1iLmQ

Following that you will be asked for the Google Analytics profile that you want to add this dashboard to:

That’s it! Now you should be able to access this dashboard from the left hand side menu (section “Dashboards”). The dashboard will be configured exactly as ours, but will be populated with your data.

The trick about this dashboard is that we created a custom filter to include only the traffic metrics for the social networks rather than all referring sources. Thus, you can customize or add widgets to this dashboard using the following dialog and the below filter (don’t forget to chose “Regular Expression” when writing the filter condition).

(^facebook.com|^m.facebook.com|^t.co|^twitter.com|^linkedin.com|^pinterest.com|^youtube.com|^plus.google.com)

Hope you find this dashboard useful in your daily work, and let us know in the comments if you’d like to see more tips on custom dashboards for Google Analytics!