Reporting on our brand's organic social media efforts is critical in determining if what we're doing is working and understanding our audiences better. This page outline specifics on our reporting, including definitions of metrics.
For GitLab Team Members only
| I'm looking for… | …this report or dashboard will help. |
|---|---|
| Overall Brand Social Performance | Sisense Brand Social Performance Dashboard |
| Sheet to enter raw performance data | Raw metrics sheetload for Sisense (available to social and data team only) |
| Ad equivalency dashboard for all social data | Social Ad Equivalency Dashboard by objective and campaign |
Check out the FY23 OKR Epic here
The number of times that users took action on our posts during the reporting period. This includes likes, retweets, comments, saves, replies, reactions, and shares. Does not include quote retweets. These actions are not weighed equally, and over time we'll be developing a unique and proprietary reporting method for engagements.
The number of times during a reporting period that users engaged with our posts as a percentage of impressions. This metric indicates how engaging particular content or campaigns are overall. Engagement rate has been a pillar in social reporting for a decade, and is most closely tied to content quality.
Our brand social team uses Sprout Social as our social media management software to schedule, engage, and report social media efforts. The majority of this data is already available natively across channels but is not curated or collated well for our purposes. Our single source of truth for all organic brand social data is Sprout Social, however, for our wider team, Sisense acts as our data warehouse and visualizer.
Learn how we pull data from Sprout, add it to a sheetload, and get it into Sisense with this video (available to team members logged into our GitLab Unfiltered YouTube account only).
Impressions are the number of times that our content was displayed to users. There are a few caveats:
Engagements are the number of times that users took action on our posts during the reporting period. This includes likes, retweets, comments, saves, replies, reactions, and shares. Does not include quote retweets.
Post Link Clicks (Link clicks or clicks for short) is the number of times that users clicked on links from your posts during the reporting period
Ad Value (or equivalency) is the GitLab-specific social media advertising dollar equivalent organized by post objective
Net Follower Growth is the total number of new followers, less the amount of unfollows.
Follower Growth Rate is a percentage of growth over a reporting period. While we may look at this month-over-month, it's best-reviewed quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year.
Engagement Rate is the number of times during a reporting period that users engaged with our posts as a percentage of impressions. This metric indicates how engaging particular content or campaigns are overall.
Our cadences allow us regular reporting periods and the ability to be accountable to our team members in other groups or report performance regularly. The social team will not accommodate random reporting requests that were not previously required, agreed upon, or that the team feels inappropriate to use time or review the data.
These epics can act as a living warehouse in GitLab to pull data from quarterly progress or campaign specific wrap up issues. The social team ought to add a link to these reporting issues to the FY Performance epic.
The social team will pull data for overall brand performance and select topics/campaigns before the end of the second week of the month following the reporting month (e.g., January data will be available before mid-February). The Sisense dashboard takes approximately 24-hours to refresh after raw data is added to our sheetload.
We will also add the necessary data to our Ad Equivalency dashboard in Google Sheets.
Workflow is as follows:
month and the value sections, so that these can be updated to the month you're reporting for.source_details section of the Sisense intake sheetTopic Template tab of the Sisense intake sheet. Highlight all data from column c rightward and copy.Campaign and Topic Reporting tab of the Sisense intake sheet, from column c rightward. This will act as the intake for one of the topics/campaigns we report on. Select one of the Topic/Sprout Tag items to use and complete all of the data by heading to the Tag Performance Report in Sprout and selecting the appropriate tag.Campaign: All Remote Brand, Tag: Press Coverage, Tag: Blog SharesSisense will update all data in approximately 24 hours.
We'll be able to review the full quarter of overall brand performance in Sisense following the refresh with the third month of data added, typically before the end of the second week of the new quarter.
When the social team adds the third month of data from a quarter to the ad equivalency dashboard, we'll include the average CPC and CPM by social channel, closing the metrics for the quarter. Note, ad value performance won't be available until after the quarter closes.
We'll wrap each quarter with an issue outlining performance and insights. Please use the social-quarterly-report issue template. Here's what a completed issue on quarterly performance looks like.
Annual reports should encompass all consumption methods: Epics, issues, written summaries, a deck, and a recording of the deck with the social team reviewing.
Use the FY21 epic and issue outline to build the FY22 versions.
Annual reporting should be communicated to campaign/topic stakeholders, the communications and corporate marketing team, and the marketing organization overall. Include as updates in the #marketing Slack channel.
With social media data, there will always be a set of limitations based on what metrics are available, how each channel defines them, how our tools collate the data, and whether or not other variables are in play.
Tag use in Sprout is the core mechanism we use to develop reports on social media performance. This is why it's important to consider using all tags that might be appropriate to use, for every post scheduled. Below, you'll find details on some of our most used tags and tips for using them effectively.
All tags, except campaign tags, can be used together and often should be included together. This means you may be using more than one pillar or type tag.
Content Pillar Tags allow the social team to tag the most common identifying item among our posts, the overall purpose or focus of the post. Most pillar tags are associated with other teams the social marketing team works with, as these are the easiest identifiers to connect on. Pillar tags allow us to develop reports for top level focuses to show long term performance at the highest level.
These tags are stackable, they can be combined.
Content Type Tags allow the social team to measure performance by formats. This is important for us to measure how engaging individual types of content are, as well as, whether or not we'd hit other goals.
These tags are stackable, they can be combined.
Campaign tag types appear differently in Slack. They have their own section to select a tag when scheduling content. You can also build a social campaign from start to finish using the Campaign Planner feature, which includes timelines, a brief form, and other details. Campaign tags are used based on the campaigns we work on at GitLab and allow for more granular reporting. Rather than relying on performance for all remote content overall, we can target specific events (like REMOTE) or marketing campaigns (like the Remote Work Report).
Campaign tags are not stackable, they cannot be combined. Since only one campaign tag can be used for posts, it's important to keep communication objectives for the post clear and include only one campaign.
Some existing tags we may use throughout the year are identified below, but new campaign tags will be created according to the campaigns we work on through the year.