What is a post engagement report?
A post engagement report is a tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Facebook Insights, Instagram Analytics, Twitter Analytics) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., likes, shares, comments), enabling teams and agencies to monitor post performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
Post engagement reports are typically created using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a post engagement report?
An actionable post engagement report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive post engagement reports
Executive reports for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show the impact of post engagement on brand visibility. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Engagement analysis: by platform, using metrics like engagement rate and reach for large audiences.
- Content performance analysis: top-performing posts, engagement by content type
- Cohort analysis: engagement trends by audience segment (age, location, interests)
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Post engagement manager reports
Manager reports have cross-platform views with drill-downs to see performance by post, platform, region, team member, and campaign. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-platform reporting: overall post performance, content type, or region reporting across platforms
- Goal tracking: compare current engagement vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for content and engagement mapping
- Topic, keyword, content, audience research
Operational Post Engagement Reports
Operational reports for analysts and social media managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Social: post metrics, follower growth, engaging topics/hashtags
- Content performance: likes, shares, comments, video views
- Audience insights: demographics, interests, behavior
Operational post engagement reports are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a post engagement report?
To build a post engagement report, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the report, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your report. Common sources are Facebook Insights and Instagram Analytics for social media performance, and Twitter Analytics for post engagement data.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your report.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of post engagement report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like engagement monitoring, content performance, and audience insights.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom engagement metrics, audience data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "engagement" and "reach".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your post engagement reporting use cases, such as engagement monitoring, content performance, and audience insights.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your report template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g., Likes, Shares, Comments, Engagement Rate, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g., by date, post type, audience demographics, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your post engagement reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your post engagement reports:
Share
Share your post engagement reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a post engagement report?
Post engagement reports should include a mix of visibility, engagement, and audience metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of social media posts towards engagement goals. They include:
Post engagement KPIs measure the interaction process (from the audience perspective), regardless of the platform:
- Visibility metrics: impressions, reach, followers
- Engagement metrics: likes, comments, shares, video plays, engagement rate
- Audience metrics: demographics, interests, behavior
Efficiency KPIs compare your engagement outputs to the cost, including:
- Visibility: CPM (Cost per Mille)
- Engagement: CPE (Cost per Engagement)
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one engagement stage to another
- Visibility: Frequency
- Engagement: Engagement rate
To analyze these post engagement KPIs, segment them by:
- Platform: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Content: post type, topic, format
- Audience: geo, demographics, interests, behavior
