It was just a little over a year ago that Twitter released the Twitter Analytics Dashboard to advertisers and publishers. Now, Twitter have revamped their analytics dashboard, introducing “an enhanced Tweet activity dashboard to provide measurable insights into how your organic Tweets perform”. Welcome to Twitter Analytics 2.0.

https://twitter.com/buster/status/487646027923484672

This is awesome news for advertisers, publishers, and social analysts alike who have a presence on Twitter. Here’s an in-depth look into the new Twitter Analytics dashboard and the announcement from Twitter Analytics Product Manager and Data Extraordinaire, Buster Benson, .

What’s Changed?

The first thing you'll notice once logged in is the focus on impressions: the graph that used to show your follower growth has now been replaced by a histogram that shows your Tweet impressions over the past 28 days.

There are clear signposts on the dashboard that tell you how you're performing in terms of impressions, with one welcome addition - real-time tracking. Twitter tracks how many times your content has been viewed in real-time, so you can rest assured that your stats are always up-to-date every time you log in.

The table of tweets has been revamped too, this time showing a breakdown of your tweets, filtered by organic tweets, tweets with replies, and promoted tweets.

The Tweets table shows the three main metrics: impressions (how many times have your tweets been viewed?), engagements (how many times have people interacted with your tweets?) and engagement rate (a ratio of engagements over impressions).

On the right-hand side of the page you’ll also see 5 handy graphs showing you the daily frequency of your engagements over the past 28 days, with a breakdown for engagement rate, link clicks, retweets, favourites, and replies.

However, here’s where the new Twitter Analytics Dashboard truly shines: click on any Tweet in the Tweets table, and you’ll get an overview of the following metrics:

an hourly breakdown of impressions covering the first 30 hours of the Tweet's "lifetime";

covering the first 30 hours of the Tweet's "lifetime"; impressions ;

; link clicks ;

; detail expands (number of times people have clicked on the tweet to view more details)

(number of times people have clicked on the tweet to view more details) retweets ;

; favourites ;

; user profile clicks (clicks on the name, @handle, or profile photo of your Twitter account)

(clicks on the name, @handle, or profile photo of your Twitter account) replies ;

; follows (number of times users followed you directly from the Tweet)

(number of times users followed you directly from the Tweet) shared via email (number of times users emailed the Tweet to someone);

(number of times users emailed the Tweet to someone); permalink clicks (number of times people clicked on your Tweet's permalink, or "timestamp");

(number of times people clicked on your Tweet's permalink, or "timestamp"); hashtag clicks (number of times your Tweet's hashtags were clicked; if your Tweet has multiple hashtags, Twitter will aggregate all the hashtag clicks);

(number of times your Tweet's hashtags were clicked; if your Tweet has multiple hashtags, Twitter will aggregate all the hashtag clicks); embedded media clicks (number of times your embedded media were clicked on);

(number of times your embedded media were clicked on); app opens (if your Tweet includes an App Deep Linking Twitter Card, and a user successfully opens your app from it, it will be counted towards this metric);

(if your Tweet includes an App Deep Linking Twitter Card, and a user successfully opens your app from it, it will be counted towards this metric); app install attempts (if your Tweet includes an App Install Twitter Card, this metric will count all the times someone tried to install your app - successfully or unsuccessfully);

(if your Tweet includes an App Install Twitter Card, this metric will count all the times someone tried to install your app - successfully or unsuccessfully); dial phone (if your Tweet includes a Lead Generation Twitter Card with the option to call you, this metric will count all the times a user dialed a number through the Tweet).

When it comes to Promoted Tweets, Twitter will break down engagement metrics for Promoted Impressions and Organic Impressions.

Lastly, if your promoted Tweet is part of a campaign you’ve set up in Twitter Ads, you’ll now be able to see how many engagements your campaign has received in total, as well as the campaign engagement rate.

This is a huge improvement from the previous Twitter analytics that only used to show the number of replies, retweets and favourites. Now you can see exactly how people engage with your content, what ticks and what doesn’t, and you can now correlate that to Twitter growth (especially useful if you tweet multiple times per day).

What’s Gone?

With all these great changes and improvements, two metrics have been taken away from the dashboard: daily followers and unfollowers.

As the Followers graphs has been replaced, you now can’t have an overview of how many followers you’ve gained and lost per day. New followers are now shown at tweet level instead of daily level, so unless they’ve followed you from your tweets, they won’t be shown in the new dashboard. As for the number of unfollowers, this metric has completely disappeared from the new dashboard.

Impressions - At Last

For the first time, advertisers and publishers will be able to see information related to Twitter impressions - real Twitter impressions. Before this new dashboard, most tools used to rely on Potential Reach, an approximation based on engagement and/or follower count.

One metric that Twitter isn’t providing publicly is reach - while you can now see exactly how many times your tweets have been viewed (impressions), you can’t tell how many people viewed those tweets (reach). This is in line with the Twitter Cards Analytics Dashboard which shows impressions without the reach.

So, what do these impressions cover?

Twitter web views;

Mobile app views (Android or iOS);

Logged-in and logged-out views (so if your tweet is embedded in an article and you happen not to be logged into Twitter, it will still be counted as a Tweet view).

Quick note: Twitter doesn't give stats on impressions and engagement data for Tweets created before 1st October 2013.

What about the exports?

Previously you were able to choose a date range when exporting tweets, with a choice to download a maximum of 500 tweets in either CSV or XLS version. This has now changed: when you click on “Export data”, it will automatically download the last 3,200 tweets in CSV format, with a detailed breakdown of all impressions and engagements for each tweet.

While a lot of people (especially marketers and analysts) will use these exports for their social reports (or perhaps out of curiosity), there’s no limit to what you can do with these reports in CSV format.

For instance, you can correlate Twitter impressions with retweets; you can compare the performance of your organic engagement rate with your paid engagement rate; or perhaps, if you’re lucky enough to know how to code, you can play around with the exports like Bill Johnson did with this example.

https://twitter.com/dubrie/status/488158223279853568

Who has access to this?

If you advertise on Twitter, a Twitter Card publisher, or a verified user, then you should have access right now.

Here’s a quick way to see if you have access: click on the following link: http://analytics.twitter.com/user//tweets. If you fit Twitter’s criteria, you’ll be directly pointed to the new Twitter Analytics Dashboard. Otherwise, you’ll see a message from Twitter prompting you to get access by implementing Twitter Cards on your website. (Here’s how you can do so: Twitter Cards.)

How About Twitter Analytics Tools?

It’ll be interesting to see how social analytics tools adapt to this change, especially since these new metrics are currently unavailable through the Twitter APIs.

Having said that, there’s nothing stopping the various tool providers from working out a workaround. The first analytics provider to do so right away was Simply Measured (you can read more about their clever workaround here: bit.ly/1y8iKNK).

https://twitter.com/FR314/status/488695719143149568

In the meantime, if you haven’t already done so, you may want to ask your social analytics provider if they have any plans to integrate with the new Twitter Analytics Dashboard anytime soon.