We use Simply Measured to track out owned channels performance across social, as well as hashtag analysis.
Pros
Easy Interface
Hashtag analysis
Historical Data
Cons
Exports could be condensed so that Excel doesn't crash every time I try to open.
Likelihood to Recommend
Simply Measured is great for people who do not want to spend too much time analyzing their owned social channel data but instead want a short and sweet snapshot of the your brand's performance. It is less appropriate for people who want to easily manipulate their data in many different ways.
Simply Measured was used by our social team to make social measurement less manual and to give us some view into platforms that are dark and don't have great analytics, like Tumblr. It was also a really valuable tool for us to start identifying influencers. We were able to search on our hashtag and then sort by who had the most followers. It helped break through a lot of the noise.
Pros
Holistic, incorporates most major social networks.
Lets you also get competitive insights by tracking similar companies.
Nice looking reports that are easy to export.
Super easy integration.
Cons
While it incorporates MOST platforms not all of them, I believe Pinterest was still in trial. They will need to keep up to date as new platforms emerge.
Not a super user friendly interface. I found it to be a bit clunky and dated looking.
While their training was good, and they had good support resources, I think they good do more with marketing and education to help my team uncover more value from the software.
Likelihood to Recommend
Right now Simply Measured is a good solution for those medium sized business that are big enough to need social measurement, but can't afford something like Sprinklr. It's a great way to be able to show a little more ROI in your own social efforts, and to also understand the amount of chatter happening about your brand. If I could have afforded it, I would have loved a program like Sprinklr that I feel is a little more idiot-proof and user friendly. That said, for the price it did the job and helped our team mature.
Simply Measured is used at the enterprise and departmental level. It helps provides insight into our social media strategies.
Pros
In-depth research.
Competitive analysis.
Multi-channel roll up review.
Cons
The theoretical reach figure in the Twitter report is not particularly useful or accurate.
The interface has a learning curve ... but all powerful tools do.
Expensive compared to other social media analytic platforms.
Likelihood to Recommend
Simply Measured is a great tool for account analysis. If you are reviewing individual accounts on Twitter, Facebook, etc., it provides in-depth analysis and can calculate individual message reach. For global or macro analysis (what's trending globally or nationally), the tool is less useful. You may want to consider a different tool for that.
Currently Simply Measured is central to reporting our performance on our client social channels especially for platforms that don't have the availability to export data (Instagram and Google+). It is used for hashtag tracking for certain brand campaigns. Customer service analysis has been extremely useful for determining sentiment and monitoring real time crisis situations. The fan page report is used to help with strategic planning.
Also I love their blog, it is awesome and so insightful. I meed to start listening to podcasts.
Pros
Customer service analysis has been extremely useful for determining sentiment and adding context to real time crisis situations.
Convenience of pulling data for all social channels at one time is extremely effective in making decisions in real time and to compare against other channel performance. The cross channel export minimizes a great deal of time for exporting data. Nearly all social channel data is available.
Reports are extremely user friendly, visual and easy to export. Also the ability to see the raw data and to have it for historical reference is great.
Key insights generated in the dashboard page help add fast context for performance.
Cons
Unable to access historical data for some channels depending on when they are tracked.
No Vine reporting.
Likelihood to Recommend
Simply Measured is well suited to all scenarios for reporting, generating quick insights and ability to share with internal teams not privy to analytics so they can understand performance. Convenience is the best part that makes it fit in all scenarios.
Simply Measured is being used by the social media and marketing teams to generate useful reports on social media engagement and results across several brand accounts.
Pros
Gorgeous Reports: Simply Measured's reports are not only useful but very well formatted and presented. The visuals need no altering before being useful for users at all levels of the organization.
Relevant Data: Simply Measured helps us cut through the noise of Facebook Insights. It's helped me learn more about the data that's available and how to interpret it to inform upper management.
Communication: Simply Measured does a great job updating users on improvements and sending articles that highlight how to use their reports for business decisions.
Cons
Connecting Facebook ad accounts could be easier but that may be Facebook's fault and our Simply Measured rep is working hard to help us get this sorted out.
Likelihood to Recommend
Every situation! Just start by using their free reports and you'll see the value.
Right now we are currently under utilizing the tool because of lack of budget. We are only currently watching 5 of our social channels but feel that with the acquisition we now should be watching more than 5 social channels. We are using this for the demand generation team in marketing. When we we're Net Optics it was being used for the whole marketing team. For our team it helps us consolidate all our social reports into one dashboard and we're able to see data that we couldn't before.
Pros
The engagement data for the 5 channels we watch helps us determine what content really spoke to our audience. Helped us determine what we're the topics people we interested in the most. For our Network Test LinkedIn Group I'm able to see my top keywords within the group posting on what really worked. I can see that when we posted on traditional test our members really interacted. Surprisingly our blogs did better on LinkedIn than on our own website so that was nice to see that data.
For our Net Optics Youtube channel I like that I can see how our activity has done especially with news of the acquisition how we we're to still be able to see that we still getting people to watch our videos. Our engagement data actually increased which was nice to be able to see and show to management that certain social channels needed to be kept. We really like the keyword analysis that helps drive what descriptions we use for our VIdeo SEO in our video marketing strategies and help me determine how to best optimize certain videos . The distribution of views by video duration helps drive the development of future video content because we're able to see the shorter the video the better it performed when it came to certain topics.
For our Google+ pages it was great to see the level of engagement by post type. In Demand Gen we're constantly trying two different ways to A/B test which method worked better. What we found was that our audience didn't want to read our post they we're more engaged when it came to posts with photos and posts with video. We we're also able to see okay what have we been heavily posting and what we found was that we we're posting so many articles when what we should of done is increased our posts on video.
Cons
So what would be fantastic if Simply Measured became like Hootsuite where we're able to see how our social channels are doing and we can schedule and post in one location. That in my opinion would be great.
It would be nice if there was more Google integration. So if we use a Google url shortener we would like to be able to track in Simply Measured our efforts on social all the way through. Also have our website reporting be brought into the platform.
Using Marketo it would be nice if Simply Measured and Marketo teamed up to work out the sales insight feature that Marketo has and utilize Simply Measured to give better reporting data.
On the video front I'm always torn with the engagement data that comes from vidyard, Brightcove, etc if Simply Measured could integrate with them so that my youtube and videos watched on my website we're all in one dashboard from Simply Measured with additional engement data like drop off rates, being able to add forms to videos, etc that would be powerful
Likelihood to Recommend
When we we're determining what's important to us we think budget, are we stuck in a contract; can it grow with our needs without hurting our pockets; can it solve our needs because we're such a large company that we almost need several solutions in one. Reporting - am I able to provide management the details they need to know to prove ROI? Also can we prove that demand generation efforts lead to closed deals?
Simply measured was used to consolidate social reporting and online customer care into a dashboard, helping visualize data and make reporting more qualitative than quantitative. Not only did it help save time, it created actionable insight in ways I never thought to use the data.
Pros
Easy integration of social data sources like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even Google Analytics
Customer care reporting provided is data that would be impossible to assemble manually
Really like that it has both visual elements to the data, but easily links to the data sources
Easily exported into Excel, Powerpoint, and PDF's
Cons
The reporting output is pretty solid, not requiring much manipulation, which is good - as the ways to really adjust are limited in some areas.
Do not like the billing structure - a number of clients (especially larger clients) only want this depth of reporting on a monthly or quarterly basis - making the investment a bit big for the client - even if it saves a ton of time for the agency partner.
Wish there were easier ways to compare two data sets (like comparing one month to a previous month) or combine the data more easily from multiple sources than what is offered
Likelihood to Recommend
This tool is invaluable for customer care monitoring and social reporting. The investment though only makes sense when clients or brands want this sort of reporting on a weekly basis - as for monthly reporting only, it's hard to justify the hours saved vs. the money invested. You really need to understand what a client expects from their data and if plain Excel sheets are fine, this tool is overkill - but for those who really want more and expect outputs visually - this tool is great.
We used it to deliver analytics to our social media clients. It was immensely helpful because it did a lot of the work for us by not only compiling all of the data but also putting it in an easy-to-read and pretty-to-look-at format. Many of our clients don't want truly raw numbers when we deliver reports, so it's nice to have the graphs generated for you. What I loved most was that you can adjust the charts with the raw data, and you can export to ppt.
Pros
Their customer service is stellar. They're very quick to address any issues you have. Made my job much less stressful.
Simply Measured pulls the data and makes it very easy to read. They also create charts with the end-user in mind. Rather than creating a graph just because they can and calling it good, they think through what our clients will want and deliver that.
SM also does an exceptional job of updating reports to reflect social channels' changes. As we in the industry know, Facebook is often changing things with little to no warning. SM never makes you wait long until the changes are reflected in their reports. Even better, sometimes they will leave the old report available to you so you don't have to adapt if you don't want to!
Cons
I wish I could download the entire reports as a jpg.
More often than I'd have liked, I had to re-authorize my accounts.
It would be nice to be able to move the graphs around to reflect my client's individual needs.
Likelihood to Recommend
The only restriction I would foresee would be budget. Simply Measured was an absolutely great social media reporting tool. In my current role, the budget doesn't allow for Simply Measured so I am left to use a multitude of platforms rather than one concise tool. One consideration you may want to ask during the selection process is, "do I need this robust of a reporting tool?" Some clients don't need that deep of a dive into their analytics, so it's important to align where you're spending your dollars with what your client values.
It is being used to monitor ourselves and our competitors. Due to budgetary restraints it is carefully used by the corporate team. It is a nice way to monitor social and competitive data.
Pros
Captures competitor social media details
Captures our owned social content metrics in great granularity
Provides varied charts as well as raw data
Cons
They change their export now and then which makes the automation with our BI tool challenging
Many of the charts and metrics provided are not necessary
It's rather expensive to monitor as much as we would like
Likelihood to Recommend
Monitoring/budget limits are a big concern. Deciding on monitors must be well thought out. Other tools are better suited for competitor analysis.
Do you need to customize digital / social media measurement reports and generate them on a frequent basis? Then simply measured might be the way to go.
