WeChat Official Account admins have access to some pretty useful analytics to help them understand how their WeChat marketing is performing, the types of people following their account, and who is consuming their content.
In this post, we’ll give you a point-by-point overview of the analytics in WeChat’s backend.
Log In
WeChat’s analytics dashboard is part of the Official Account management area. It can be accessed from https://mp.weixin.qq.com/.
Normally, the default language is Chinese, but you can also switch to English. Choose your language via the globe icon on the top right-hand of the page; however, the whole backend system is not 100% translated.
To log in, you’ll need to enter a login and password or scan a QR code with the WeChat app on your phone. If you have access rights, that will log you in; if you don’t, the administrator will need to authorize your access each time you attempt a login.
WeChat User Analytics
WeChat provides an aggregate view of your user demographics, but no user-level data.
General followers
- Daily Data: Data on the total number of followers, new followers, and unsubscribed followers.
- Filterable by source: All sources, Official Account search, QR code scan, WeChat Channels, followers from the article page, and others.
- Device type: Android or iPhone.
- User demographics*:
- Gender: Male, female, or other.
- Language.
- Chinese province and city. There’s no geo-data for users outside of China.
*These are based on information the users entered, so they aren’t very reliable.
Consistently Engaged Followers
WeChat also filters loyal users, called consistently engaged followers (常读用户), for analysis. This means this segment of users watches and reads your articles more than others. Since WeChat folds messages, these users will see your Official Account at the top of their messages.
These user demographics can help you create your potential users’ personas to improve your WeChat advertising campaigns.
Below, you can see the number of new consistently engaged followers, the total number following the account, the percentile increase that month, as well as the trends.
Information about the gender of these users is also available (you can also compare this to the general followers).
You may want to know the age of these users and compare activity across different groups. For the consistently engaged followers, the age of >60 accounts for a larger representation, while when checking those less engaged followers, the >60 group is the smallest.
Where these followers are in terms of their location, as well as the terminal distribution (Android or iPhone), can also be seen.
WeChat Article/Content Analytics
INDIVIDUAL ARTICLE ANALYTICS
For each article, you can see the overview of the important metrics. This helps understand how your followers received the article and how it was spread to more readers.
Note that for individual articles, you can only see the trends concerning views for 7 days or 30 days after publishing. It’s common to see an article perform well over the first seven days, but then the data will go down slowly (see below).
While this suits the short-term peak views of the average WeChat post, it can’t help understand how well the article does in search results later.
It shows the number of people the article was shared with and who read it. Within the data set for shares, there’s even more granularity:
- The total number of shares (including re-shares from people who aren’t followers).
- The resulting number of reads. Note that “shares” means shares to different places, including Moments (newsfeed), groups, direct messages, and miscellaneous.
If you have a larger follower base, it will make the top of the funnel larger, and the bottom of the funnel will grow larger if
- you have a better-targeted/more active follower base,
- a more attractive article intro,
- more people share the content, and
- you publish at the right time.
You can also see the share rate and the expansion rate. In short, they’ll share it if they think it’s useful for their WeChat friends, entertaining, and/or reflects well on them.
Finally, you can see demographic data for the article organized by gender, province (China), and device type. It has the same limitations as the account-level user data mentioned above.
AGGREGATE CONTENT ANALYTICS
Besides data for each article, we can gather data about all the WeChat content over time (e.g., from the previous month).
The first thing you’ll see is the trend of article views and viewers by day, and both of these metrics are highly influenced by the content itself.
The source of article views helps us determine how people share the content. Here are the six categories and one way we might interpret them:
- Official Account messages – These are the messages that followers will see in their subscriptions folder. Clicks via these should grow over time, and your followers will be influenced by attractive titles and images. However, long-time followers will also be a lot more likely to click if they liked your content in the past.
- Chat – If there are any users, share your articles in their friend’s chatbox.
- WeChat Moments (newsfeed) – Points two and three are ways for people to share your content, and this can vary by account. We usually expect more shares to Moments for less-niche content, while we expect more shares to groups for niche content. For example, a user might share a technical article about factory automation with a group of people who work in the manufacturing industry because they don’t think their wife and school friends are interested in it. Overall, we want to know the WeChat campaign/target readers’ sharing behavior and then work from there.
- Likes from friends (朋友在看) – If the user likes it, they can click the heart at the end of the article, so the article will be shown in the “your friend is reading it” (朋友在看) area. This is another less obtrusive way to share content than sharing it on Moments.
- Recommendations.
- Others:
- Search. It’s possible to increase search traffic using SEO-like tactics, so let’s call it “WeChat SEO.”
- WeChat Official Account (OA) bio. Users who visit your account can read the article from the content list in your bio.
- Miscellaneous.
Hourly views can give insights into the best time to post content.
The image above contains the hourly views on the day an article was posted. It had 89 views within the first hour and then fewer than 62 views in the following hour.
Next, we have the number of views the day after. In this case, views peaked in the morning and later in the afternoon.
All of the above analytics are available for videos as well as articles. We often share videos within articles; when we do, we’ll zoom in to check the video-specific metrics.
WeChat Menu Analytics
WeChat Official Accounts feature menus that allow users to click to view articles, WeChat pages, or external web pages.
For each menu option, WeChat shows the number of clicks and visitors/users. To improve these results, we will sometimes change the menu items or layout.
WeChat Message Analytics
This area displays an overview of the messages sent to your account by users.
You can see the number of messages, users (message senders) per day, and an overview of popular keywords used in messages.
Although messages only stay in the system for 30 days, the analytics data remains.
WeChat Interface & Web Page Analytics
This data is mostly to help users know how often a third-party tool is used, or if it’s having problems. The following information is provided:
- Number of calls
- Failure rates
- Average load times
- Highest load times
WeChat Report Template
Not all the data in your WeChat report is useful; we mainly focus on the increase in followers, shares, views, and—most importantly—leads.
The new backend feature allows you to analyze your most engaged followers (the ones who love your content the most) and will deepen your understanding of these users, their behavior, and what they enjoy.
Still have any issues analyzing your WeChat performance? Feel free to talk to us!