Analysing Social Media insights and the associated data is complicated. There is so much data available that it can often feel like looking at The Matrix when it comes to reporting time.

With so much data, it can become a time consuming and expensive task to turn your data into social media insights with meaning.

But this is crucial if you’re going to improve what you’re doing. We believe that the best way of getting this meaning is through contextual insights.

Here are 5 reasons we think you should believe as well.

1) Insights are just data in context

To create an insight, you need to place data into context. It’s meaningless otherwise.

For example, say two ads drove 1,000 clicks in total. On its own, this information isn’t hugely insightful.

But if we apply some context to the data, it starts to reveal more insights.

In this instance, the data shows that 75% of the clicks came on a mobile device between 7-9am and 5-8pm. This would suggest the audience clicking on your ads are doing so during their commute.

Boom. With a tiny bit of context, all of a sudden your data has much more meaning than it had before.

2) More context means more social media insights

If adding context to data generates insights, the more context you apply to it, the more insightful it becomes.

And more insight means more valuable data.

It gains value because it can tell you so much about the relationship you have with your customers and target audiences.

This is hugely important when analysing social ads that aren’t sales or conversion focused.

It’s easy to measure the value of a conversion ad. You just look at how much you spend and how much you sold.

But when it comes to more nebulous things, like brand awareness or engagement, your Social Media data needs to deliver more value because your ads aren’t driving a direct sale.

By analysing your reach or engagement ads in more contextual depth, you can draw out insights about your customers and audience that can help inform what you do further down the funnel.

3) You can focus on your objectives

If you’re single-minded about your Social Media objectives, you can use contextual insights to drill down into whether you’re meeting these objectives.

Take something like engagement. Rather than just looking at one ads performance over another, you can understand who is engaging with those ads, how they engaged with it and why.

Breaking down demographic performance (age, gender, location) can show you the differences between who is engaging with your ad.

Looking at device, platform and time of day can show you how they chose to engage with your ads.

And by looking at the creative, ad format and copy with your ads, you can see what drove this audience to engage.

Analysing your data through this context can provide you with a wealth of insights that can improve your ads and allows you to focus on what’s really driving the performance that your brand or client needs.

4) You don’t lose insights because your reporting is too top broad

It’s easy to see why so many clients or bosses want top-line results. They want a short, to-the-point idea of whether their ads have worked or not and if the money they spent was worth it.

However, the problem with creating top-line results or bundling performance together is that it hides the crucial detail that can allow you to improve.

With two ads that generated a combined click count of 10,000. If you just report that 2 ads drove 10,000 clicks, what happened if one drove 9,000 and the other 1,000?

With contextual analytics, you always see a detailed breakdown of performance allowing you to see what’s working and what’s not.

How detailed you go is up to you. And more often than not, we present top-line figures that are backed up with contextual insights that explain this performance.

But simply bundling up performance means you’re just presenting numbers and not actually providing analysis of what these numbers mean.

5) It can inform all your other advertising

Social Media advertising can tell you so much about your customers. We think of it as one of the greatest market research tools ever invented.

Not only can you drive marketing and business performance with it. But your ad data can tell you so much about how your customers interact with your brand or content.

By applying contextual analytics to your social data you can start to reveal insights around how your customers do and don’t respond to the messages you show them.

Say you’ve run 10 ads – 5 featuring lifestyle images, 5 featuring product shots. Contextual insights can tell you exactly how your target audiences interacted and responded to these ads.

These insights can then be used to inform your overall creative strategy.

If you know that 18-24 year old women respond best to lifestyle images on the weekend and that 18-24 year old men prefer product images during the week, then you have data driven insights that can form the basis of your wider advertising campaigns.

Start analysing your social media insights data up to 70% faster

If you’re spending too much time analysing your Social Media ads and not enough time making them better, then contact us. Help is at hand!