Social Media Analytics
Reading the numbers and turning them into decisions: metric definitions and pitfalls, reach and views, engagement, retention curves and watch time, traffic sources and attribution, audience analytics, revenue analytics, spreadsheets and dashboards, experiments and A/B tests, reporting to brands, and data ethics and privacy.
CRE-202 Year 2 3 credits 12 lessons · 5 h 25 min
Offered by HSM University · Content Creation
This is the Canadian version of this course. See the American version.
What you'll learn
- Explain how creators use analytics to support decisions and choose KPIs that match their goals
- Interpret platform metric definitions, recent changes and common pitfalls such as denominators, bias and confounding
- Analyse exposure metrics including impressions, reach, views, follower share and new versus returning viewers
- Evaluate engagement by action type, calculate engagement and growth rates and detect inauthentic engagement
- Read retention curves and watch-time metrics to diagnose openings, pacing and content structure
- Use traffic sources, click-through rates, tracked links and attribution to understand discovery and conversion
- Interpret audience demographics, geography, devices, activity and loyalty, and build evidence-based personas
- Measure revenue streams using RPM, CPM, effective CPM, conversion, churn and lifetime value, including costs and risk
- Build and maintain a tidy content log, summary statistics, charts and a simple analytics dashboard
- Design and interpret experiments and A/B tests using confidence intervals and sample size estimates
- Prepare honest media kits and campaign reports that present typical performance and campaign results
- Handle audience data ethically and lawfully under Canadian or US privacy rules and complete an analytics review
Course content
12 lessons · 5 h 25 min total · final exam
- 1 Why analytics matter 25 min · quiz
- 2 Metric definitions and pitfalls 27 min · quiz
- 3 Reach, impressions and views 27 min · quiz
- 4 Engagement metrics and what they mean 27 min · quiz
- 5 Retention curves and watch time 27 min · quiz
- 6 Traffic sources, click-through and attribution 27 min · quiz
- 7 Audience demographics and behaviour 27 min · quiz
- 8 Revenue analytics 29 min · quiz
- 9 Spreadsheets, tracking and dashboards 27 min · quiz
- 10 Experiments and A/B tests 28 min · quiz
- 11 Reporting to brands and media kits 29 min · quiz
- 12 Data ethics, privacy and capstone 25 min · quiz
- E Final exam 20 questions
Requirements
Recommended background. You can start any course at any time.
Description
Reading the numbers and turning them into decisions: metric definitions and pitfalls, reach and views, engagement, retention curves and watch time, traffic sources and attribution, audience analytics, revenue analytics, spreadsheets and dashboards, experiments and A/B tests, reporting to brands, and data ethics and privacy.
Part of the Film & Photography stream, typically taken in year 2.