If you manage a Facebook page for your business, you’ve probably seen a screen like this one. This is your “insights” page and it’s a great tool for when it’s time to run analytics. The problem is, if you’re new to social media or even just new to using social media for marketing purposes, you may not know exactly what these stats are showing you or how to use them.

What is the difference between followers and reach?

Engagement and clicks?

How do these things tell you what is working and what isn’t?

Here is a guide to help you with social media marketing terminology.

Analytics 101 for Digital Marketing

Followers

Your followers are the people who have liked or followed your social media account. These are the people who will see your organic posts as they scroll through their news feed. The more followers that you have, the more people who will see the content that your page is putting out.

Continually growing followers is important because the more people who follow your page, the more people you reach with your posts.

Reach

Reach is a measure of your potential audience, how many people might see your post. It’s good to have a large number when it comes to reach, but remember, reach does not mean that your audience reacted to the post or even noticed it, just that they will potentially scroll past it at some point (This is why it is important to put out content that attracts the attention of your followers.). Reach is a great number to use as a denominator when you are trying to figure out the percentage of success for the rest of the metrics of digital marketing.

** While reach is a popular way to measure your potential audience, it is being phased out as a metric. At the moment reach is still available on a few legacy formats, including Facebook.

Impressions

The number of impressions is the number of times that a post is actually seen. This is not the number of engagements, only a number of views. Impressions give you a good idea of how many people are seeing your content and that gets you one step closer to gaining a customer for your business. There is one problem with the measurement of impressions and that is that if someone views a post multiple times, that will count as multiple impressions when really only one person saw it.

Engagement

Social media engagement is extremely important in measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns. How are people reacting to your posts? Likes, shares/retweets, comments/replies will help you get your audience involved in the conversation and spread the word about your brand and products. You can use this metric to identify what kind of posts are working and what kind of posts are not working and in some cases even hurting you.

Clicks

If getting more traffic to your website is your goal, the clicks metric is going to be the most important for you. Clicks are the number of people who went to your website through a social media post. These are the people who are definite potential customers because they took that step toward purchasing your product. If you’re getting a lot of clicks from one particular post, you might want to start using more content similar to that one.

Influencers

This metric is mostly used for Twitter or Instagram. Most people follow some type of social media influencer, whether it’s a celebrity, instagram model or a popular Twitter account. Some of these influencers will show a certain product or brand in their posts and some of their followers will be influenced by that because they have come to know and trust the influencer through social media. If an influencer is using your product, that is a good thing to track because that person is gaining potential customers for you and your business.

Now that you know the basics for measuring your digital marketing success, you can begin creating content based off of what will get you closer to reaching a marketing goal that you have set for your business.