Website and social media data can be analysed to give brands powerful insights into their marketing strategies’ performance, their audience, and their competitors’ activities.

To understand what data you can extract from these channels, you first need to know the terminology that is used to define this data. The media update team looks into the different types of data produced by brands’ digital platforms to help clarify these terms.

Measures – the raw data

Measures are the numbers you’ll see in a database, on a spreadsheet, or on the dashboard of a social media platform. On their own, they only provide basic information to marketers like the amount of unique page views an article on your website received, or the amount of likes a post on Facebook got.

When measures are combined, they deliver figures and statistics that can provide marketers with insights. They might provide few actionable insights on their own, but they are the foundation on which metrics and analytics are built. Without measures, there would be no intelligence for marketers to learn from.

Metrics – what the numbers teach us

Metrics are made up of a number of measures that are processed to form a rate, percentage, or ratio.

On Google Analytics, for instance, Bounce Rate is calculated using the number of website visitors with a specific time frame, as well as the amount of those visitors who only read a single page on the website.

A metric describes what the data means, while the measures are the figures that make up that data. The metric is like the question you pose: “By how much did mentions of our brand increase on Twitter in December?” The measures are processed to answers this question with a specific number: “27.3%”.

Analytics – the process that delivers insights

Analytics is not a unit of measure, neither is it rates or ratios that describe such measures. Instead, analytics is a practice. It’s the act, process, programme, tool, or technology that your marketing team uses to compile measures to track metrics and gain insights.

Web analytics and social media analytics are both processes that track measures to provide marketers with actionable intelligence. These practices are different from marketing analytics and business analytics, which combine measures from a number of media channels and sources.

The measures that are collected in analytics processes, along with information generated by your clients, your industry, the marketplace, and economy, all make up what we call Big Data.

As you delve into the benefits of using Big Data in digital marketing, you’ll find that you have mountains of measures, fewer metrics, and only a handful of analytics processes, depending on the amount of marketing channels you track.

Now that you have a firm grasp on these terms, learn more about AI in our article 10 AI terms every marketer should know.

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