Overview

Simply Measured is a tool that provides social media analytics to individuals, brands, agencies, and business – small, big and anywhere in between. Their Twitter bio describes them quite well:

“Our software helps bring social media analytics to life. Over a dozen data sources in one place. Beautiful reports in Excel, PowerPoint, and on the web”

Simply Measured covers:

• Measurement (measuring your social media performance and efforts);
• Listening (tracking online mentions of keywords);
• Active Monitoring (alerts based on custom triggers you can set).

A Quick Note

Before we begin, here’s a quick note on how Simply Measured works. There are three factors that determine what price plan you’re going to be placed in:

• Social profiles: the number of social media accounts you want to track;
• Audience: the sum of all the fans, followers, subscribers and connections (for LinkedIn analytics) for all the social profiles you track. If you decide to throw Google Analytics in the mix too, your average weekly unique visitors counts towards your audience size;
• Mentions: total mentions of keywords and hashtags that you want to monitor.

Based on these 3 factors, you’ll be placed on one of these three plans:

Having said that, those aren’t the only plans available – Simply Measured are quite flexible when it comes to pricing, so they have plans that scale to meet your needs, whether you’re part of a large brand or a small digital agency.

Once you’ve set up your account, you can share it with others too. Of course, in the name of security, everyone you add to your account will have their own credentials (email address and password), and they can be placed in groups too if needed (e.g. a Customer Service group and a PR group).

One last note: me being a design-freak and a lover of great UI and UX, I’ve put Simply Measured through a lot of “design scrutiny”, especially outside of the desktop environment. Simply Measured is fully compatible with mobiles and tablets. The layout fits perfectly on mobile and tablet, regardless of screen size, with a fully responsive design that looks as gorgeous as the web view on a desktop. More importantly, every mobile tap works as perfectly as a web click, to make sure you can run and view reports on the move without being tied to your desktop. Smooth!

First Steps

The first thing you’ll see after logging in is the main dashboard. Here you’ll see all your options and available reports. At the very top you’ll see Reports, Data Collections, and Account.

• Reports is where you’ll find the full list of reports you can run and reports you’ve already generated;
• Data Collections is where you can see all the data sources you’ve linked to Simply Measured; here you can also create folders (‘collections‘), to group data sources when and if needed (more on this later).
• Account, as the name suggests, is the place for any account-related settings – time zone, plan details, adding/removing team members and more.

This first screen shows you all the reports you can run. To make your reporting life easier, Simply Measured breaks down and sorts these reports based on their function and platforms:

• Single Profile: reports for individual accounts.
  
• Multi Profile: reports to see how your accounts perform together, to give a holistic view of your social efforts. Not only does Simply Measured offer platform-specific multi-profile reports (e.g. a report to see how your various Twitter accounts stack up), but also a complete social media snapshot, to see how all of your accounts across multiple platforms perform together to achieve your targets.
  
• Competitive: reports to see how you stack up to your competitors. Included in this is also a share of voice report, which tells you, through social listening, what your organic share of voice is across the web.
  
• Influencers & Trends: reports that identify the influencers within your audience. This report also points out people who drive traffic to your site, to see who your brand ambassadors and advocates are.
  
• Keywords & Hashtags: reports that monitor keywords, hashtags and links.
  
• Customer Service: reports with a focus on your customer service efforts on social media.
  
• Web Traffic: reports that integrate web analytics with social analytics, to show you how your social efforts have an impact on your website (and vice versa).
  

Besides that, Simply Measured also sorts its reports by platform, namely:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Instagram
• Google+
• Tumblr
• LinkedIn

Simply Measured is a strong social media analytics tool not only because of its in-depth reporting, but also because, like me, it believes that your social efforts shouldn’t be completely separate from your other online efforts. Social analytics and web analytics, when brought together, can give you a deeper, richer story that a silo outlook on social would never be able to give you. To support that, Simply Measured integrates with Google Analytics, as well as social listening.

Simply Measured supports two more social platforms: Vine and Pinterest. Simply Measured was the first tool to offer Vine analytics, just 20 days after Vine’s public launch. Pinterest reporting is currently under development, and while the reports aren’t available for public use yet, you can apply to be one of the first users here.

 Other Features

Simply Measured makes reporting easy with so many features, such as:

• Scheduled Reports: you can schedule any report you want, with highly customisable scheduling options.
• Generated Reports: Simply Measured offers you a repository with all your generated reports. What’s the limit you say? None. I still have reports that I ran months ago, and they’re still sitting there, intact. This is a lifesaver, especially for anyone who has to deal with social media reports on a regular basis and knows that keeping reports organised isn’t always an easy task. Simply Measured does that for you, with smart filters that organise your reports by creation date, report type, platform, and date range covered by the report.
• Data Collections: this is a social media manager’s best friend, especially when you have quite a few social accounts to report on. Think of it as folders or smart filters, with which you can organise your social data sources.

Reports Overview

Now, let’s get to the meat and bones of Simply Measured – the reports. Most Simply Measured reports have a similar consistent structure:

1. General overview displayed as an easy-to-read infographic, to tell you what’s going on at a quick glance;
2. Audience, with insights on your fanbase/followerbase and traffic;
3. Engagement, with insights on how you’re engaging with your audience, and how your audience is engaging with your content in response;
4. Optimisation, with smart tips and data-driven recommendations based on your social performance;
5. Community, showing you who’s driving the conversation to your profiles, within your profiles, and away from you (detractors);
6. Content, giving you an overview of what worked (and why it did), what didn’t work (and why it didn’t), and an interactive chart with the list of your top posts; this is totally customisable, so you can filter and sort your posts by type (e.g. photo, text, video), date, reach, and much more.

Quick tip: if you’re not sure what each report does, Simply Measured displays a brief explanation when you hover over the report icon.

When you open a report, the default view is the web view. Your report will open in the browser and you’ll notice the following options:

• Twitter share, if you want to share your report on Twitter.
  • I admit I used to struggle to see the point in this. I had two problems with this: first of all, why would you want to share a report about your brand publicly on Twitter? Secondly, why just limit social sharing to Twitter – why not extend this to Facebook, Google+, Pinterest etc? After doing some digging around, I noticed that some reports may be useful for public consumption (outside of your brand/company/office). For example, if you want to run a report about a viral social media story (e.g. Ellen’s viral tweet) and you want to share it online, you can do so with Simply Measured. So, while I still can’t understand why you would want to share your own Facebook report on Twitter, I can definitely see how social sharing could come in handy for some of the other reports available.
• Date view: this intelligent view shows you all the other reports you’ve run for the same accounts/data collections as the one you’re viewing, and it shows them in a calendar view, so you can easily switch back and forth between reports to compare stats. This is great if you run social campaigns and want to compare your last campaign to a previous one.
  
• Report activity: here you can have a view of everyone who’s viewed your report. This will only be useful for people who share their account as part of a group (e.g. two social analysts with separate logins having access to the same reports).
  

That is not all – you can export your reports in PowerPoint and Excel formats, each giving you different options.

The PowerPoint export is pretty much what you would expect: each section in the web view is a slide in the PowerPoint file.

Although the PowerPoint export comes in black by default, you can always change the theme, or you can upload your own.

Although I find the web view and PowerPoint exports useful, as well as visually appealing, I recommend you look beyond these and try the Excel exports, especially if you want to dig into more data. This is where Simply Measured truly shines.

Speaking of Themes

I’ve briefly touched on themes, but there’s so much more that I could say about this. While the main two themes for Simply Measured reports are ‘Black’ (default) and ‘White’, there are a few more you can use, depending on the type of report: the Influence reports have a Pastels theme, and a few snapshot reports also have a special Reading Rainbow theme too.

While most people might only see this as a simple option to trigger on or off, there’s a story behind this – there was a demand from clients, Simply Measured listened and took action.

“Themes would offer our customers the ability to change the colors of their reports. At the time reports were offered in only one dark style ‚Äì predominately grays and blues on a black background. Users wanted the ability to customize reports in their brand colors or custom theme colors. They had also requested a lighter and brighter version of the standard theme.”

The mechanics behind this are quite complex too, and you can feel free to read it on the Simply Measured Engineering Blog.

This is but one of the many examples of Simply Measured listening to user feedback, be it from social media, email, or (in)formal conversations with the account managers. You can rest assured that you’re not only paying for the snazzy reports

Excel Exports

The Excel exports may look like “just” a spreadsheet version of the web view, but they’re much more than that. These exports come with quite a few tabs (each with their own function), which you may eventually find more useful than the web view(s).

There are five sides to the Excel exports:

• Charts: this is the same view you have in the web view, except in Excel format. Simply Measured provides filters all over the Excel dashboard, so you can run your own segments or change granularity (e.g. from a daily view to a weekly view, or hourly – or a minute view, if you fancy!).
• Tables: this is where you have the main sections of the web view in table format. Useful if you want to run your own graphs or you want to incorporate this data into your existing tables.
• Calculations: this is the sheet that feeds all the data back to the Charts sheet. If you want to change the text on the main sheet (e.g. to add more details to a campaign report) or the formulas, you can do it here.
• Controls: this is the tab that feeds formatting settings into the “Charts” tab (e.g. week starting day, chart date ranges).
• The Nuggets: if you’re an avid data geek like myself, you’ll rejoice at the sight of these tabs, which I like to call “the nuggets”. The tabs to the right of “Controls” have all the insights you need in raw form, giving you more than what your current platforms already give you in most cases.

So, what do the Simply Measured reports offer? How are they better than what the platforms already offer (e.g. Facebook Insights, Twitter Ads Analytics)? I’ve taken the time to go through each and every report, to analyse what they provide, so you too can see what Simply Measured can offer you. However, instead of long paragraphs of what each report does, perhaps you’re mainly interested in what you can get out of those reports. So, I’ll take you through each and every report and highlight the questions that these reports answer.