5 Snapchat Analytics You Need To Learn Today

Social media managers know that Snapchat is an enormous opportunity to gain exposure, increase customer loyalty, and most importantly stay hip with the rest of the young whipper SNAPPERS (pun intended).

But while more and more brands jump onto the platform, much mystery (and frustration) persists for brands trying to extract usable data. To be honest, Snapchat’s metrics are a hot mess—much of which must be manually calculated on the daily.

Yep, Snapchat is the wild west of social media metrics. As the app matures, and greater numbers of brands flock to its snappy shores, we’re likely to see more sophisticated metrics tools emerge. In the meantime, we’ve summarized five key Snapchat analytics to help you draw meaning from the Snap-sanity.

Unique Views

No matter the platform, knowing how many people are engaging with your content is critical information. On Snapchat, this is told through unique views. The total unique views refers to the number of people who have opened the first video or image and viewed it for at least one second. Snapchat only counts each viewer once (regardless of how many time they watch a Snap or Story) thereby presenting an accurate metric of how many viewers each photo or video snagged.

Screenshots

Engagement on other platforms like Facebook and Instagram translates to likes, comments, and shares, but for Snapland, engagement can be tracked through screenshots.

Screenshots can also help encourage engagement and are particularly useful when measuring the success of a coupon code or other screenshot-focused campaign. By tracking what type of content gets the most screenshots, it’ll help you determine what type of content resonates best with the audience and who your biggest promoters are.

Take Taco Bell’s Valentine Day Snapchat Campaign for example!

Completion Rates

Nobody likes when someone gets up in the middle of them talking, same goes for snapchat. To drive your brand story home, you need to keep viewers engaged from start-to-finish.

Much like website bounce rates, completion rates measure how many viewers watched your Story through to completion. With this insight, you’ll be able to quickly tell which stories are resonating with your audience.

It’s super easy to calculate. Simply divide the final view count by the first view count.

Fall-off rate

Just like bounce rates, fall-off rates can give you powerful insights into the engagement strength of your story by revealing exactly where followers stop watching your story.

To calculate this, simply find the difference in views from one Snap to the next, divide the difference by the views on the first Snap and multiple by 100.

With this calculation in hand you’ll be able to pinpoint the exact spots in your Story where viewings dropped off. Going forward, you can then use these insights to better optimize the structure of your Stories for better engagement.

Time of the day activity

The young whippersnappers that run Snapland didn’t provide marketers a way to track activity. But you still need a way to understand when they’re most active.

To do this, run several test Snaps at different times and days of the week. For each Snap, note the posting time and date and compare the unique views and completion rates earned during those periods. Over time, you’ll likely begin to see a pattern for the periods where your Snaps are most visible to your audience.