140 Characters of Painful Metrics

Twitter’s paltry analytics platform

Mark Stuart
On Advertising
3 min readAug 23, 2016

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First things first, this isn’t a post slating Twitter, I love Twitter, it’s the first thing I look at when I wake up, and the algorithm actually helps me see more interesting content and I appreciate its introduction. The real-time nature of it makes it the perfect companion for TV and sports events. But it’s analytics platform is absolute garbage, and not only does it drive me round the bend, it must be impacting on the time brands spend on Twitter.

Twitter’s Analytics platform (analytics.twitter.com) has been broken for a couple of months now. I’ve got access to more than a few accounts through my role at BBC, but I just don’t feel that I can rely on Twitter’s analytics platform for any of them and that adds a world of pain to my day.

I’ve lost count of the number of videos I’ve looked at which have reached 25,000+ users, some 250,000+ users, but only been “viewed” twice.

Two views, two meager views… let’s get this clear. A view on Twitter is counted after just three seconds, the exact same as Facebook, but for some reason, nothing is being registered in the main app.

The above tweet reached 259,164 users, but apparently, just 117 people took 3 seconds of their time to watch the video, yet more people (199) retweeted it.

Switch to the video tab, hunt through the videos (because, of course, you can’t organize the videos) and it has actually been viewed 58,000 times.

As video plays such a key part in the strategies of Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, it’s such a basic issue which surely doesn’t require much legwork.

That’s the physically broken part, what about the rest of it?

Where to start…

  • You have to re-enter your date range any time you switch between the Tweets and Videos tabs.
  • Top tweets are always organised by Impressions - even if the cursor makes it look like you can click on engagements and engagement rate — you can’t.
  • There’s no immediately available video figures in the main analytics console.

And there’s simply not enough data! Facebook has more than 230 measurable metrics. Twitter has less than 40.

From an advertising standpoint, that’s paltry. When you compare it to Facebook, there’s a whole world of opportunity. Facebook’s offering, which is boosted by the fact you log-in as yourself and share your name, age, gender, location etc., gives such a deep understanding of who’s engaging with your content, right down to how long they are watching your videos.

Perhaps it’s a drawback of being based in the UK, where Twitter’s Audiences tab offers significantly less for Your Followers than All Twitter Users

As an analyst, I’d love to find out more about our Twitter audience, even though it’s a fraction of the size of Facebook. With deeper insights and a greater understanding of this audience, I can’t help but feel there’d be far more opportunity to grow and develop the audience on this platform. After all, Twitter is the perfect companion for TV, right?

Obviously these views are my own, as I spend my days plowing through data for BBC Scotland, but I’m extremely interested in hearing your experiences with Twitter and your thoughts on the platform. Tweet me @MarkStuart46 or respond below. If anyone from Twitter sees this, DM me and point me in the direction of where I can provide feedback. I just want to help!

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Mark Stuart
On Advertising

Social Media Analyst at Red Bull, formerly BBC Scotland. I spend more time analysing tweets than writing them.