When someone recently asked me what is the number one challenge for marketers in the near future, I replied that it would be how to bring together the various types of data regarding their customers, communities, and audiences and make sense of the insight before their competitors outsmarted them. The first step in doing this, if your business hasn’t done so already, is to bring all of your web and social media analytics into one place. Fortunately, I recently had a chance to try out Metricool and see if it could help my small business reach this objective. Here is my Metricool review for you to consider.
Most businesses start out using Google Analytics and accessing each social network’s analytics separately, sometimes populating the data in spreadsheets and trying to make sense of it. Some social media dashboards will add analytical reporting, but in many cases the data that is shown is more of an after thought. That is why if you are serious about your web and social media analytics, the time might have come to invest in a dedicated tool to the task.
Enter Metricool.
Metricool is a relatively new entrant into the social media analytics space, but even though you might have never heard of them, they’ve been rapidly growing since their start 3 years ago. The reason that you might not have heard of them is that they mainly have a presence in Spain and Latin America, but now they are looking to expand their horizons and grow their market share in English-speaking countries.
With all of this background information, let’s take a deeper dive into Metricool’s main functionality. You’ll be surprised at the unique functionality they have added to become a somewhat comprehensive social media tool for business that deserves your further examination. In fact, calling them a mere social media analytics platform is actually a disservice, as you will find out once you read this Metricool review to the end!
Gather All of Your Web and Social Networks – Organic and Paid – in One Location
While social media dashboards might provide some analytical support, Metricool provides reports on a wide variety of platforms. Specifically the platforms that you can access include (see picture below for a visual representation):
Social Media
- Facebook Business Page
- Facebook Group
- Instagram Personal Profile
- Instagram Business Profile
- LinkedIn Company Page
Paid Ads
Website
- Website
- Google My Business
With all of these platforms, Metricool will be able to give you a very unified view of your digital presence.
Easily View Your Web and Social Media Analytics Over Time
The unified reporting makes it very easy to understand how your social media is performing. Specifically, for each social network, you can choose to see your metrics across the standard time periods:
- Yesterday
- Last Week
- Current Month
- Last 30 Days
- Previous Month
- Last 12 Months
- Custom Time Period
The ability to see and compare your metrics over the same standard and varied times with touch will make your work highly efficient.
Next is on to the specific metrics for each social network that Metricool shows you. Obvously the specific metric will depend on the social network, but the ordering of information is logical and unified regardless of social network. These social media metrics include:
- Community Growth, in terms of Followers/Likes, Daily Followers/Likes, Followers/Likes Per Post, Following, Daily Page Views, Daily Posts, and Weekly Posts
- Follower Demographics, showing gender, age breakdown, followers by country, and followers by city
- Page and Post Interactions, in terms of Clicks on Page, Engagement, Interaction, Reach, Impressions, Reactions, Comments, Shared, Post Clicks, Daily Likes, Likes per Tweet, Daily ReTweets, ReTweets per Tweet, Daily Mentions, and Mentions per Tweet
- Ranking of Posts by Likes or ReTweets, including the ability to download all of your posts in CSV format as well as hashtag impressions and numbers of posts to Instagram
- Comparisons to your Competitors, which gives you a quick way to compare followers, following, posts, likes, shares, and engagement.
Here’s a snapshot of what the top section of analytics for a single social network would look like, to give you a feel:
Being able to easily compare performance amongst competitors and dive deep into what they are doing well – or not so well – is another killer functionality as you can see below:
When it comes to website analytics, I thought that the Metricool metrics were easier to understand and better displayed to summarize your situation than that of Google Analytics. The information is laid out and summarized as follows (see picture below for a visual):
- Overall Viewing Stats including page views, visits, visitors, published posts, comments, daily page views, daily visits, daily visitors, page views per visitor, posts per week, amnd comments per post
- Ranking of Posts that were published during that time period, including page views, visitors, comments, as well as shares on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
- Visitor Countries
- Page Views
- Traffic Sources
Keep Tabs on Your Brand’s Performance in Realtime
All of the above information are all included in one of the four main tabs called Evolution. Looking at the next tab brings us to information that is called Real Time. This real time information actually includes a set of four different tools as follows:
Realtime Web Tracker
Ever wonder how your website is doing in realtime? Metricool will show you how many online visitors you have on your website as well as what pages are being viewed right now. This is in addition to providing you the following related information if you want to check the immediate performance of your website:
- How many visitors and page views you’ve received in the last 30 minutes, today, and last 24 hours
- A real time log of your most recent visitors including how many minutes ago they visited your site, their approximate location, how they found you, and what page they looked at
- Which countries you had visitors from, which URLs got how many page views, and what sources drove the most traffic to your website today
Here’s a visual of the information you can gather:
Hashtag Tracker
Looking for a hashtag tracker? Believe it or not this social media analytics tool has you covered! Tracking is done as an optional $9.99 per 24 hours per social network, the two networks that Metricool covers being Twitter and Instagram.
This tracker includes a realtime screen with analytical information as well as the invaluable reporting page that appears after the campaign is done. Below is a brief look at a sample report for Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Marketing World #smmw19 hashtag during the four days of the conference:
- 4,055 participants created 25,607 tweets generating 744 million impressions
- Outside of the usual sources, the most tweets that came from social media dashboards came from Tweetdeck and Agora Pulse
- 54% of the tweets came from people who’s profiles are not based in the United States, with the United Kingdom coming in first for “foreigner” tweets followed by Canada, Australia, and India.
- The top three number of interactions go to Mari Smith, Chris Strub, and Social Media Examiner. I came in 90th 😉
- In terms of numbers of mentions, Social Media Examiner came out on top with Mari Smith coming in second, followed by Madalyn Sklar, Chris Strub, and May King Tea. I finished in 49th 😉
In addition to the above type of “Top 100 data” for social media users, you can also see the ranking of top tweets by impressions, followers, likes, ReTweets, interactions and engagement in addition to the top hashtags and top 100 picture – and that is for Twitter alone!
On the Instagram side, some highlights of #smmw19 include:
- There were 3,539 posts that generated 162,000 likes and 12,365 comments
- The top post was from social media influencer Peter Hollens, which generated 2,624 interactions, with fellow social media influencer Jasmine Star coming in a close second generating 2,609 interactions
You can analyze the top 100 most liked Instagram posts using the #smmw19 hashtag by number of total interactions, comments, and likes. In addition the top related keywords can be found as well.
Here’s a snapshot of what the Hashtag Tracker looks like for a #socialmedia example:
Twitter Community Management
In the same “Real Time” section in Metricool we have a module dedicated solely to Twitter. This section analyzes your most recent 8 days on Twitter and breaks down your tweets into originals, links, retweets, pictures, replies, and videos. It also takes a look at the number of interactions you received in the same period in terms of likes, retweets, mentions, and replies.
From a community management perspective, this part of Metricool also shows you who your “best friends” are, those that have mentioned you the most as well as those that have replied to you the most in this 8-day time period
Finally, there is a space to see all of your followers and confirm whether you follow them or not. You can also search for a given username to confirm the present status, allowing you to ensure that you follow back those that are following you and you missed following – or vice versa.
If that wasn’t enough you can actually compare all of the above with any Twitter user to give you all of the comparative Twitter data you might not need.
Messages for Social Customer Service
If the Twitter module above is about Twitter community management, the Messages module included in the same Real Time section are about bringing all of your social media messaging apps together and managing them in one place. Specifically, this functionality allows you to manage the following messages for your social customer service:
- Facebook Messenger
- Facebook Page Comments
- Instagram Comments
- Twitter Direct Messages
Here is a visual of what to expect from this functionality:
Using Metricool as a Killer Publishing Tool
If you thought that Metricool was only about metrics, surely the above modules showed you that this tool has a number of rich functionalities and is almost several tools in one.
While Metricool is not a social media dashboard like Agora Pulse. SproutSocial, Hootsuite, or Buffer, it does have a Planning section which allows you to effectively use Metricool as a social media publishing tool and schedule content to publish as well as an Instagram feature that you will definitely need if you currently are not using other solutions.
See the Best Times to Post on Each Social Network
Part of your planning process for publishing content is to know what are the best times to publish content on each social network, right? Metricool has you covered by providing you this analysis as a color code in your calendar for each social network.
For instance, based on my specific social networks, it recommended the following times at which I should be publishing: (all times are Pacific time)
- Twitter: 7 A.M. to 3 P.M.
- Facebook: 5 P.M. to 5 A.M.
- Instagram: 3 A.M. to 8 A.M., 11 A.M. to 3 P.M.
Obviously, everyone’s community is different but this is good information to have on hand to feed your strategy. Here’s a visual of what the publishing calendar with color gradations for best time to post (best times being darker) would look like if you scheduled content to publish inside Metricool:
Upload a CSV File to Schedule Posts
Once you know the best times to post, you can schedule posts individually or upload a CSV file to schedule posts.
Download a CSV File of Your Scheduled Posts
One of the unique features of Metricool is the ability to download a CSV file of your scheduled posts. This can be extremely helpful if you want to edit your editorial calendar: Simply download, revise, delete your scheduled posts, and upload!
Create An “Autolist” of Social Media Posts to Recycle
Autolists help you plan the content from your social networks in a more effective way, allowing you to focus your time on creating new contents or accomplishing other tasks. Managing your Autolists properly will help you better organize the content you share on your social networks, attract more followers and increase the engagement and number of interactions.
If you are the creator of evergreen post that you want to schedule for never-ending publishing, Metricool has you covered with their “Autolist” feature. You can create these recycling queues of content manually, by uploading a CSV file, or by connecting a RSS feed.
Here is what manually entering content into an Autolist would look like:
Note that if your tool doesn’t have this functionality you should consider Metricool for this alone. Metricool actually did a small study of 100 Metricool users, 40 of which used the Autolists tool to schedule social media posts. The study showed that those users who work with Autolists spent a lower amount of time managing their social networks and more rapidly increased the number of followers and visitors to their blog. If you’re a community manager or blogger, Autolists can definitely help you catapult your productivity.
Create Your Own Instagram “Link in Bio” Page
Every brand should have a “Link in Bio” feature on their Instagram profile, and if you don’t have one, Metricool provides you that functionality within the same tool that you use for everything else. Simply choose a photo and add a link and you’re done!
Here is what the interface looks like inside Metricool:
And for those of you who have never seen what this looks like on the front end, below is an example of a link in bio and what you see when you press on the link:
What other unique features does Metricool have outside their social media analytics? The final set of functionality that the tool provides is all around Paid Media.
Keep Track of Your Google and Facebook Ads Campaigns…Inside Metricool!
As Paid Social has become as important than Organic Social, any social media metrics tool should be pulling in data from the leading ads dashboards of Facebook as well as Google. Metricool has you covered, and shows you the following data so that you can follow the progress of your ad campaigns without leaving the app:
- Reach, showing total impressions, reach, and spend
- Results, meaning clicks, conversions, and spend
- Performance KPIs, specifically CPM, CPC, CTR, and spend
- Campaign Table, which shows when each campaign launched, impressions, reach, clicks, conversions, actions, CPM, CPC, CTR, and spend per campaign, including the ability to download all of the data
Metricool’s latest functionality is to go beyond analytics and give you control over managing your current Google and Facebook Ads campaigns from within its tool. If you do advertising campaigns in Google Ads and Facebook it can be tiring to change platforms to see how your ads work in each of them.
Not anymore. Below is a view of the tool showing data for Facebook and Google Ads together in the same interface:
Metricool for some time has provided data and statistics on how your ads work in both Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Recently they added new functionality so that now, in addition to analyzing, you can manage the performance of your online campaigns and make changes to your campaign budget as well as pause and active ads right inside Metricool.
Facebook Ads Management
The Facebook Ads Manager has never been an easy to use tool for small businesses. In many ways, Metricool makes it much easier to see the performance of your Facebook Ads than you could inside Facebook.
At your fingertips, in an easy to see dashboard, you can access the following about all of your campaigns as well as make the following adjustments from within the app:
- Campaign name and objective
- Campaign start date
- Status – which you can change directly from Metricool
- Daily budget – which you can change directly from Metricool
- Campaign spend
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Conversions
- CPM
- CPC
- CTR
- Conversion Rate
Google Ads Management
Metricool uses the same approach to allow you to visualize and manage your Google Ads. What is unique here is that Metricool will allow you to see the Quality Score of your campaigns and ad groups to give you the insight you need to manage your Google Ads campaigns outside of Google as pictured below.
What is also unique is that you can see your Facebook Ads and Google Ads together in the same screen to compare apples and apples and manage your entire paid ad spend over Facebook and Google within Metricool.
The advantages of Metricool’s solution for managing paid ads are:
Save time: You will save time by having the campaigns from both advertising channels in the same platform.
Get a full view: You can view the performance of all your ad campaigns at a glance. You can see your Google ads or Facebook ads independently or together to have a better idea how your ads are performing as a whole on the Internet.
Take actions directly: You can make informed decisions after checking how your ad groups and campaigns are performing: to make changes, adjust the bidding and enable or disable your ads.
Compare all your campaigns: You can compare your Facebook and Google’s campaigns and use a larger budget for the one with a higher performance. You can also compare your ad groups and keywords, all the metrics will help you to decide the budget to each of them.
Comprehensive and Automated Reporting
If all of the above wasn’t enough, Metricool provides automated reporting on the above in an easy-to-digest template which is customizable, a perfect solution for agencies who serve many clients.
My October report was at 43 pages showing me all of the information that I need at my fingertips, allowing me to adjust my strategy. Knowing that I can get this report sent to me automatically every month means that I don’t have to dive in to the analytics on a regular basis and instead can wait for them to come to me.
Here’s a glimpse of what the reporting looks like, from the customization back end on the left and front end product on the right:
Metricool Review Summary
Metricool has built a robust platform which is a web and social media analytics tool at its heart but has branched out into encompassing many functionalities that marketers will find convenient to manage in one place. Because Metricool does not include the basic inbox of @mentions or columns of searches that you might have in an Agora Pulse or Hootsuite product, this one application will not replace every social media tool that you own. However, as a tool to use together with your social media dashboard, it encompasses a lot of rich functionality which just might replace a few of the secondary tools you currently use.
That’s my take on this Metricool review.
For those of you interested, Metricool offers both free and premium plans. The free option comes with some limitations but it helps to give a good idea of what the tool has to offer and allows users to decide if they need to upgrade to a premium subscription. This is the link to see each of their features:
Any Metricool users out there that can chime in on their functionality?
This is a post written by me on behalf of one of my marketing partners. All opinions are 100% mine.
Neal Schaffer is a leading authority on helping businesses through their digital transformation of sales and marketing through consulting, training, and helping enterprises large and small develop and execute on social media marketing strategy, influencer marketing, and social selling initiatives. President of the social media agency PDCA Social, Neal also teaches digital media to executives at Rutgers University, the Irish Management Institute (Ireland), and the University of Jyvaskyla (Finland). Fluent in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, Neal is a popular keynote speaker and has been invited to speak about digital media on four continents in a dozen countries. He is also the author of 3 books on social media, including Maximize Your Social (Wiley), and in late 2019 will publish his 4th book, The Business of Influence (HarperCollins), on educating the market on the why and how every business should leverage the potential of influencer marketing. Neal resides in Irvine, California but also frequently travels to Japan.