Why is Snapchat analytics important? Because they allow you to prove the return on investment (ROI) of the platform by helping to:
- Learn about your audience
- See which content performs best for your audience
- Gain a competitive advantage in the market
- Unlock engagement strategies
- Discover key engagement times
With Snapchat’s built-in analytics tool, Snapchat Insights, you can track and optimize your Snapchat metrics, including:
- A detailed look at the story skins. How many viewers have seen your story over the weeks, months, and years?
- Audience demographic. The age, location, gender, and interests of your audience.
- Completion rates. How many people watch a Snapchat story to the end?
Let’s take a look at the tool and how you can use it to learn more about your target audience.
Ingredients
How to use Snapchat Insights
Other Snapchat analytics tools
8 important Snapchat metrics to watch
How to use Snapchat Insights
Knowing how your Snapchat campaign is performing is essential to any social media strategy. Fortunately, with the Snapchat analytics tool, you’ll be able to determine the platform’s ROI more easily than ever before.
Note: Snapchat Insights is currently only available to influencers and brands that are verified or have a large following. From the Snapchat website: “Insights is available to instant chatters with Official Stories or creators who build a large audience on Snapchat!”
If you want to start creating your Snapchat below, don’t worry: Check out our guide to using Snapchat for business.
Once you have Snapchat Insights, it’s time to dive into your analytics, which brings us to the point…
Step 1: Open the app
Go to the app on your phone and Tap the Snapchat icon to open it.
Step 2: Go to your home screen
To get to your Snapchat insights, you first need to go to your home screen. Open the app and tap your bitmoji in the top left corner.
Step 3: Access Snapchat Insights
From your home screen, under “My Story” you’ll find a tab labeled “Insights”. Tap your Insights tab to access your Snapchat analytics.
Note: If you can’t find the Snapchat Insights tab, make sure you have the most up-to-date version of the app on your phone. If it still doesn’t show up, try uninstalling and reinstalling the app before restarting your phone completely.
Once inside, you’ll have access to all your Snapchat Insights data, the first page of which will look like this:
Other Snapchat analytics tools
If you’re looking for a great way to look at your analytics outside of Snapchat Insights, you’re in luck. There are lots of great Snapchat analytics tools you should use to keep track of your marketing campaigns.
Two we recommend: Snaplytics and Delmondo.
Let’s take a look at both now.
snaplytics
Launched in 2015, Copenhagen-based Snaplytics has positioned itself as a great Snapchat analytics tool.
Key metrics available through Snaplytics include:
- open rates
- viewing
- Average number of screenshots per story
- Completion rate
delmondo
Delmondo is another great Snapchat tool to add to your analytics belt. Used by big brands such as McDonald’s and Spotify, Delmondo’s metrics stand out especially with its daily automatic data collection and long-term reporting features.
Key features offered by Delmondo are:
- Key metrics including unique views, impressions, completion rates and screenshot rates
- audience information Provides a detailed overview of who is watching your content
- Channel comparisons Provides channel benchmark data to show you how your Snapchat Stories stack up against your content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
8 important Snapchat metrics to watch
Now that you know how to access Snapchat Insights and a few great third-party tools, it’s time to take a look at the key metrics you’ll want to track for your social media campaign.
Them:
1. Unique looks
In the box labeled “Story Views (YTD)” you can see how many unique viewers in total have seen your Snapchat story. This is the total number of people who opened and viewed the first video or image in your Snapchat story. at least one second.
The viewer is counted only once. This means that the number you see reflects the total amount of users who saw your content, regardless of how many times they actually watched the story.
At the bottom of the box, you’ll also find the total number of unique views you’ve netted for the week and month.
2. View time
Your view time shows how many minutes your viewers watched your Snapchat story. Like your story views, you can view year-to-date information and time in weeks and months.
This shows how successful your content is in not only grabbing people’s attention, but keeping it as well. If you see a drop in these numbers, you may want to consider changing the type of content you promote.
If you want a more in-depth look at your view times, scroll down to the next window in the middle.
There you will be able to see the average view time for each day of the week. This is how long, on average, viewers watched your story before moving on to the next story.
This data will tell you two things:
- What day of the week is best for posting. For example, based on the data in the image above, you might consider posting more often on Thursdays and avoid the weekend.
- How long should your story be? If you find that your audience watches your story for around nine seconds on average (as in the example above), you may want to keep your content around nine seconds.
Overall, views will help you determine the type of content your audience wants to see and the length they want to see it.
3. Completion rate
To view your completion rate, simply scroll to the final metrics page in the middle of the information screen labeled “Percent Story Views”. There you will be able to see your completion rates for the whole week.
Like a website’s bounce rates, your completion rates will show you how many viewers watched the entire story from start to finish. You can determine if your Snapchat story resonates with your target audience.
Before Snapchat Insights, influencers and brands had to divide the last view by the first view to determine completion rate. You’ll now have access to your completion rate on your “Percentage of Story Views” page.
You want to keep these numbers close to 100 percent. If you find them dropping, it means your audience isn’t interested in your content enough to watch your entire Snapchat story. Consider shortening your content or changing the type of content you showcase.
4. Drop rate
Snapchat’s native analytics platform is lacking in a few areas. For example, you still can’t find the drop rate of your Snapchat Stories.
Your drop rate can give you incredibly powerful insights into the engagement strength of your Snapchat presence by showing exactly where viewers stopped watching your story.
Instead of showing where the drop rate is on Snapchat Insights, influencers will have to do the old-fashioned napkin math. Fortunately, it’s very simple.
To calculate, find the view difference from one Snap to the next, divide the difference by the views from the first Snap and multiply by 100. This allows you to determine exactly where your viewers start dropping off your story.
For example, you have a story with two photos. The first photo was viewed 100 times, the second was viewed 80 times.
100 – 80 = 20
And then:
20/100 = .20
Finally:
.20 x 100 = 20%
Request! You have a 20 percent drop rate.
Going forward, you can use this information to better optimize the structure of your Stories for better engagement.
5. Screenshots
When you’re on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, your interaction is tracked through likes and comments. However, on Snapchat, your participation is tracked via screenshots.
This is how many people have taken a screenshot of your Snapchat content.
Screenshots can also help encourage participation. They’re also useful for measuring the success of your Snapchat marketing campaign.
For example, Taco Bell invited its followers to take a screenshot of a Valentine’s card from its own brand Story and share it with their friends for their Valentine’s Day Snapchat campaign.
Follow your screenshots to find out which content types (e.g. photos, videos, filtered images) resonate the most with your audience. Also know who takes the most screenshots of your Snaps. They can eventually become one of your biggest brand supporters.
6. Demographics
With Snapchat Insights, you can now also take a look at the demographics of your followers. This can help you determine the type of content you choose to promote and who you want to target.
At the bottom of the Insights page, you can find the percentage of men and women who watched your story. You will also find the age range of your viewers.
You can further explore your demographics by tapping the “See More” button, which will take you to this page:
From here, you’ll be able to get a very detailed look at the ages, interests, and locations of your audience. You can even take it further and look at this demographics between men and women.
This data can be crucial in helping you identify everything from the photos you share to the products you publish.
7. Number of followers
It’s simple. Your Snapchat followers are people who follow you and (hopefully) engage with your content.
But what is not simple is the exact number of followers you have. Snapchat currently uses a scoring system rather than an exact follower count.
This score represents the sum of all messages you send and receive. However, there is a handy general rule that allows you to roughly calculate your followers: Take the highest number of views you’ve received on a Snapchat Story and multiply that by 1.5.
This should give you a rough estimate of how many followers you have on Snapchat. Knowing the amount of followers you have will help you understand how conscious people are about your brand and also whether your Snapchat campaigns are valuable in the first place.
8. Geofilter analytics
Geofilters are one of the coolest features on Snapchat. It allows users to add images, illustrations, custom stamps and brands to photos and videos.
For brands, geofilters are fun and powerful ways to encourage participation in a product or event.
Check out a few of these great branded geofilters:
Snapchat geofilters can even be tracked for activity. Here’s how to do it:
- Sign in to Snapchat on the web
- Click on your name in the top right corner of Snapchat
- click My GeoFilters
- Choose GeoFilter
- Scroll down to see your metrics and voila!
Hungry to push your Snapchat game even further? Then check out our post on Snapchat hacks, tricks, and features you probably didn’t know about.
