This article will explain how Funnel's social organic reports work, what different date attribution options are available, and the implications when viewing the data.

Funnel supports the following Social Organic platforms:

In social platforms, there are usually three different date attributions used: Created date, Activity date, and lifetime. The APIs from the Social Organic media platforms usually only support one type of date attribution. However, they vary between social organic platforms. See the section below called reports to see how each report is attributed.

Below is a scenario of a post being created and some example activities on that post.

The tables illustrate how the data will look based on the date attributions Created and Activity date.

Created date:
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Activity date:

Viewing data by created date usually makes sense when analyzing data with more breakdowns, for example on post level when comparing individual messages with each other. Activity date makes sense for a zoomed-out view or to understand the trends of your social organic posts activities.

For example, when looking at Engagements trends over time, it's easy to detect an increase/decrease.

Alternatively, when it is important to look at the total for a post, we need to aggregate the data to when it was created. Most of the report attributed to the activity date contains a post-created date dimension. This makes it possible to use these reports to view the total of a post by exporting a long date range and pivoting all metrics to the created date.

In the case of Google Data Studio, you can achieve this by using extract data connectors.

In some cases, the APIs are limited when it comes to lifetime values, and Funnel will only be able to retrieve data from the time the data source was connected to Funnel up until today’s date.

Lifetime values will be provided for each date value for which Funnel can retrieve data, though it would not be possible to see the trend prior to the setup of the connection.

Let's look at another example of how a metric such as total followers works. In this example, the platform starts with an initial total of 100 followers:

When this is reported as a lifetime metric in a table format, it would look like this:

This means that these types of metrics can't be aggregated. When visualizing lifetime metrics, date must be part of the query for it to make sense. A line chart is a great way to visualize lifetime metrics in a dashboard:

Lifetime metrics give the total value of your metric for the day it was downloaded. Which makes it possible to see the total follower trend over time.

Sometimes it might be interesting to also look at the net change from the previous day, i.e. the number of followers gained or lost on a given day. If you are using Google data studio you can easily track changes in followers across the platform.

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Below you can find a laundry list of Report types from these social organic platforms, and what date attribution is used. Each report name has a link that gives more information about the fields that are available when connecting that report.

* Follower metrics are lifetime

Instagram insight