Throughout this Impact Challenge, we’ve explored many ways for you to get your work to other researchers, the public, and other audiences via the Internet, by making connections at conferences, and other means.

To close out the Challenge, we’ll share four techniques for measuring the success of your ongoing efforts, starting with basic social media and website analytics.

Social media and website analytics like those provided by Twitter, Sumall, and Google Analytics can tell you a lot about who’s following your work, the potential exposure your work has received, and some limited bits about the diverse uses of your work, beyond simple pageviews and download counts.

Let’s dig into four easy ways to explore the metrics behind your website and social media accounts.

Twitter Analytics

Twitter recently rolled out an Analytics feature, which can tell you not only how many followers you have, but also their demographics and how others are using your tweets. Are your tweets being retweeted or favorited very often? If so, what are the characteristics of those tweets with high engagement rates?

The wealth of data that Twitter provides can help you learn more about the audiences you’re having an impact with (Is your work resonating in the countries whose populations you’re studying? What subjects do your followers care most about? and so on). Here’s how to get started with Twitter Analytics:

• Login to Twitter
• Click on your picture in the upper right-hand corner and then select “Analytics” from the drop-down menu
• You’ll see three tabs:
  • Tweet Activity: includes the exposure your tweets has received, the general rates that others have engaged with your tweets, and allows you to explore the activity that individual tweets have received.
  • Followers: breaks down the demographics of your followers, showing a growth chart,
  • Twitter Cards: most useful for advanced academic users who want to promote blog content and rich media. We won’t talk much about Twitter Cards in this post; check out this guide for more information.

Let’s dig into the Tweet Activity and Followers pages.

Tweet Activity

The first thing you’ll see on this page is a bar chart of the number of Twitter impressions your tweets have received over the past 28 days. Twitter impressions are the number of times your tweets have appeared in someone else’s timeline. You can think about this metric as being akin to the circulation statistics of a journal you’re published in–it’s not the same as readership, but it gives a sense of your overall exposure.

You’ll also see summaries of your average Engagements on the right-hand side of the screen. How often have others clicked on your links, retweeted and favorited your tweets, and replied to you over the past 28 days? And how many of each of these actions have you received per day, on average?

In the middle of the screen, you’ll see a list of your tweets in reverse chronological order, along with their individual number of impressions, engagements, and engagement rate.

You can click on “View Tweet details” for any individual tweet to get a drill down view of the metrics:

And this is where the good stuff lives. The chart at the top of the Tweet details page tells you the times when your tweet was most popular, and below it are the types of actions others took to engage with or share your tweet with others.

Over time, you can use this specific information, as well as more general information about your overall tweet activity, to learn when your tweets get the most impressions and engagement. That way, you can schedule your future tweets to post during similar times when sharing links to your blog posts, journal articles, and other scholarly products, so as many people see your work as possible.

Consider doing an informal analysis of your most popular tweets on a monthly basis. It’ll allow you to see what types of tweets are the most popular with your followers, and you can use that insight to share future links in a similar way.

An easy way to do this informal analysis is to export your Tweet Activity data as a CSV file. Open it up in Excel and use the Sort function to see which of your tweets have the most impressions, retweets, and other types of engagement.

Beyond Tweet Activity, knowing about your followers is a great way to learn the demographics of your audience and what unexpected demographics you’re reaching via Twitter.

Followers

Much of your Followers page is self explanatory: How many followers do you have overall, and when did you experience a spike in follower growth? What are your followers most interested in? Where are they located? Who else do they follow? And what’s their gender?

You can compare information about your follower rate to information on your Tweet Activity page to see if any particular tweets or mentions can account for a dip or rise in follower growth.

And demographic information can be useful in other ways. For example, if you’re a public health researcher studying drug use among teens in northern Europe, one way to prove that you’re successful at reaching out to that group would be to dig into your Followers data and see where your followers live; who else they’re following and their interests could give you insight as to their age and other demographic information.

Twitter Analytics give you rich data on your specific impacts on Twitter. Sumall, on the other hand, can give you a 50,000 foot view of your impacts across Twitter and other platforms.

Sumall

Sumall is a popular analytics platform that allows you to dig into your Twitter, Facebook, and other social media metrics. For the purposes of this challenge, we’ll explore only the most revealing Twitter and Facebook metrics that Sumall provides, which are:

• Twitter
  • Mentions: How often did others use your handle to reply to you or comment about you?
  • Mention Reach: How many people saw your name in their timeline?
  • Retweet Reach: How many people saw a retweeted tweet of yours in their timeline?

• Facebook
  • Post Likes: How often are others “liking” your post? This can give a big boost to your posts’ visibility among others’ friend networks.
  • Post Comments: How often are others engaging with your posts by commenting upon them?
  • Post Shares: How often have others reshared your posts?

Here’s how to explore these (and other) metrics: sign up for a free Sumall account using your Twitter or Facebook login, or by signing up with your email.

You’ll be prompted to connect other social media accounts; I suggest starting with Twitter and Facebook. Google+ and WordPress.com statistics are also available, but not detailed enough to be useful, in my opinion.

Once your social media accounts are hooked up, you’ll see the main Sumall interface. The Sumall interface is a bit buggy and suffers from some usability issues, but it is nonetheless illuminating for gaining quick and dirty insights into your metrics via charts and summaries.

On the left hand side of the screen are different metrics you can click on to add to the chart. The chart itself takes up most of the middle of the screen.

The chart lacks labeled X and Y axes; you have to hover over individual data points to see the dates at which particular metrics occurred and what those metric counts were:

Below the chart is summaries of the data points you’ve added to the chart for the specified date range:

At the top of the screen, you can set date ranges by clicking on the underlined dates. This allows you to compare data over certain periods:

All of the metrics that Sumall provides give you a good overview of the reach your work has had, and how engaged others are with you in general on various platforms. Sumall isn’t as good as Twitter or the next two types of metrics providers at telling you about the performance of your specific posts.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful platform that can tell you a lot about the traffic that your professional website and blog have received.

To get started, you need to sign up for a free Google Analytics account, then insert a small file onto your website that helps track your website’s traffic: how many people are visiting your site, where are they coming from, how long are they staying, what’s the most popular content on your website, and so on.

Hooking Google Analytics up to your blog is very easy if you’re running a WordPress blog: here’s a tutorial on how to do it in under 60 seconds.

Google Analytics provides a number of out-of-the-box reports that can be useful for learning about your site’s visitors and the content that’s most popular, as summarized by the University of Minnesota’s Academic Health Center:

• Audience overview report provides an at-a-glance overview of all the key visitor metrics for your site.
• Acquisition overview report provides an at-a-glance overview of visitor-source metrics for your site.
• Behavior overview report provides an at-a-glance overview of the key pageview metrics for your site.

Let’s take a closer look at each report.

Audience Overview Report

How many visitors have you received, and where do they hail from? Do visitors from certain countries stay longer on your website? How about visitors who’re using a mobile browser versus a desktop browser? Knowing more about our visitors’ demographics can tell us how good of a job we’re doing at engaging certain communities, and also clues like “Are visitors to my website who’re using mobile browsers leaving because they’re having a hard time reading on their mobile phones?”

Acquisition Overview Report

Are more people searching for your site than they are being referred to your site from Twitter and Facebook? What social networks are sending the most traffic your way? Digging into this report, as well as drill-down views beneath the “Acquisition” section of the left-hand toolbar, can give you insight into how you might better promote your website or blog using social media.

Behavior Overview Report

What are the most popular pages on your website or blog? Above, we’ve screencapped traffic for our blog over the past month. We see on the bottom right the most popular pages, as well as a summary of traffic just below the overall traffic chart. This can not only tell you the content on your website or blog that’s most eligible for resharing on social media as “evergreen content,” but also can tell you whether blog posts aimed at engaging the public are working.

For a comprehensive list of Google Analytics resources, check out KissMetrics’ link roundup.

What these platforms can’t tell you

None of these platforms expose much of the underlying, qualitative data like, “In what context was I ‘mentioned’ on Twitter?” or “What did all those Facebook comments actually say?”

So, be sure to use the data you’re gathering carefully!

Homework

Explore your Twitter Analytics data and sign up for Sumall or Google Analytics. After a few weeks’ worth of metrics have accumulated, dig into the data with these questions in mind:

• Have there been spikes in engagement or traffic after I shared certain types of content?
• What do these services tell me about the demographics of my readers, visitors, and followers?
• How do those demographics differ from what I expected? How are they similar?
• How might I use the data these sites provide to document my engagement efforts for professional purposes?

Tomorrow, we’ll dig into a key way to make use of your academic work trackable across the Web: minting permanent identifiers.