Tracking the performance of your social campaigns is critical in maximizing your success. But the fact is that your Google Analytics data and your Facebook data will never match entirely.

Why is this?

The only way to accurately measure your Facebook data is through Facebook reporting itself - here are some key reporting notes on the variations between the two, why they exist, and what you need to watch for.

Facebook Insights can be a goldmine of valuable data, providing specific information which can help you understand more about your audience, and optimize your platform approach accordingly (particularly important given Facebook's various algorithm shifts).

While Snapchat is known as the key place to reach younger users, as the home of tech-savvy Millennials, Snap Inc. itself rarely provides any detailed figures on exactly how many people are using each of its elements, or who, exactly, you’ll be able to reach by marketing through the app.

As the investigation continues into how social media platforms were used to push political ads in the lead up to the 2016 US Presidential Election, Twitter has announced a new approach to ad transparency which will help raise awareness of political content, and how their ads are being used more generally.

While most of the scrutiny has fallen on Facebook, Twitter, too, has been caught up in the political advertising probe – in particular, how Twitter bots were used to amplify specific messages.