Metrics in Impact

Measure your social return on investment (ROI) and optimize the performance of your organic and paid efforts on social media with Hootsuite Impact.

The metrics library lets you choose, collect, and display the metrics you want to use in your reports. Metrics are quantitative measurements of data that tell you how your social media efforts performed during a specific timeframe. Once you've selected the metrics you're interested in, you can choose how you want them to show up in your reports. Learn how to customize your report tiles.

The following metrics are available in Hootsuite Impact:

•   Facebook
•   Instagram Business
•   Facebook and Instagram ads
•   Twitter
•   Twitter ads
•   LinkedIn
•   LinkedIn ads
•   Pinterest
•   YouTube

Download an XLSX with all of the metrics in Impact

How we collect and report on your data

Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter calculate and display data differently. Impact collects data from each social network, and then displays it in a standardized way so it’s easier to analyze. That’s why, every now and then, you may find that our Impact data and the analytics data you see on a social network differ. While Impact data is accurate, the difference in numbers is usually due to the way we collect and display that data.

Page and post metrics

Impact shows results that occurred during a date range for all posts published to a Page (or Page-level metrics) and results that occurred only for posts published during a date range (or post-level metrics). Select More info on a metric tile in a report to find out the metric type. Learn how to view metric information.

Page metrics

Page metrics or Page-level metrics display results that occurred during the selected date range for all posts published to a Page, regardless of when they were published. So, if you track any Page-level metrics in your reports, the data you see is for the entire Page. For example, a metric like Page video views shows you the total number of views that your video posts received during your selected date range, no matter if the posts were published during or outside of that date range.

Social networks like Facebook also provide additional organic and paid Page metrics that let you further analyze your data by posts with no spend behind them (or organic), and posts influenced by advertising dollars spent (or paid). For example, a metric like Page organic video views counts the number of video views without paid promotion while a metric like Page paid video views counts the number of views with paid promotion. The Page video views metric counts both organic and paid video views.

Note that in both Hootsuite Impact and Facebook, Pages must have at least 30 likes before metrics can be returned for them. In Hootsuite Impact, the Insights, ROI Analysis, and Recommendations features retrieve metrics at the Page level.

Post metrics

Post metrics or post-level metrics display results only for posts published during the selected date range. So, if you review your post performance results in Impact content (or Browse Content and Filter Content in Legacy Impact) or track any post-level metrics in your reports, like Post impressions, the data you see is only for the posts published during your selected date range.

Social networks like Facebook also provide additional organic and paid post-level metrics that let you further analyze your data by posts with no spend behind them (or organic), and posts influenced by advertising dollars spent (or paid).

For example, a metric like Post organic impressions counts the number of times your posts appeared on people’s screens without paid promotion while a metric like Post paid video views counts the number of times your posts appeared on people’s screens with paid promotion. The Post impressions metric counts both organic and paid impressions.

For example, let’s say you published a few organic video posts on Facebook during the week of August 5-12, 2022, and you want to see how many people viewed them. You create a report (see Create a report), add metrics like Page organic video views and Post organic video views to your report (see Add metrics to a report), and then select to view your results between August 5-12, 2022 (see Track your results over time).

If you’re wondering why the values are different for these two metrics, here’s why:

• The Post organic video views metric counts the number of views for only the organic video posts you published between August 5-12, 2022. So, if you published a few video posts that week, what you’re looking at is the number of times people viewed those videos.

• The Page organic video views metric counts the number of views received between August 5-12, 2022 by all your organic video posts. So, if an organic video post you published the week or month before is still showing up in people’s feeds, those views are counting towards this Page organic video views metric.

Select More info on a metric tile in a report to find out whether a metric tracks results from organic content, paid content, or both. Learn how to view metric information.