Understanding the Data in Your Account

If you're looking to know more about how much data you have in your account, where it comes from, and how fresh it is, look no further.

Seth Bridges avatar
Written by Seth Bridges
Updated over a week ago

It is important to understand where your data comes from and how much is available to you. 

Data History

In the Companies section of your account, hover over any checkmark in the company matrix to view how much post and audience data is available for a company on a particular channel.

Rival IQ uses a shared-profile model, meaning a profile attached to a company in your landscape may have been part of our system for many months or years. 

If you just added a company that is new to our system, we will start gathering audience data on that company going forward. For new companies, we do not have access to historical audience/follower data. Therefore, the day you add the company is the day Rival IQ begins building your audience data.

We can, however, pull up to 24 months (depending on the channel) of post history using public APIs from social channels. The maximum historical post content that can be retrieved per channel are:

  • Twitter: the last 3,200 results

  • Facebook: up to 2,000 results

  • YouTube: up to 1,000 results

  • Instagram: up to 2,000 results

  • TikTok: up to 1,000 results

Private Data History

Private data does not use a shared-profile model, so that data is not collected until the account is connected to Rival IQ. Read more about how to connect your private data to Rival IQ here.

"Not enough history" & "Data not available" Messages

Sometimes, you’ll see a warning triangle with "Not enough history" or "Data not available." This happens when you’re viewing data for a date range in which we don’t have post or follower data. When you hover over the message we'll show an explanation for why the data isn't available. The messages will go away when we have gathered enough data to support the date range you are using. Every day we are following the company means we will have an additional day of data towards this effort. To remove these messages, try a smaller date range using the Custom Range option.

Public versus Private Data

All data in the Competitive Public Data section, for all companies including yourself, is pulled from public data. The information in this section includes engagement, post activity, and follower count.

All data in the Your Private Data section is pulled using accounts you are an admin/analyst for, and it is only available to users in your account. The information in this section includes reach, demographics, and spend. The history for private data depends on when the account was connected to Rival IQ.

Social Data Freshness

Each time you visit Rival IQ or activate a landscape within your account, we check to make sure your data is up-to-date within the freshness limits of your plan. For example, if you have a 6-hour data freshness limit, we will update the recent post data for any post we haven't updated in at least 6 hours.

When your data needs refreshing, we start our work to refresh the data and then prompt you to reload the page when we’re done. Hover over the checkmark in the top bar to check how recently we pulled new posts for all of the companies you follow.

Individual Posts Metrics Freshness

We strive to provide you with the freshest data possible while staying compliant with the various social platforms' terms and policies. To view the date a specific post's metrics were refreshed, click on the post and hover over the information bubble next to the published date. In the image below, you can see the post was published on Aug. 16, 2022, and the data was refreshed on Aug. 19, 2022 at 10:35AM PDT.

Most posts receive a majority of their engagement during the first few days after the post is published.

As such, we update post metrics for 14 days after the post's publication date for all platforms except Twitter. Due to limitations from Twitter, we are only able to update tweets for 5 days after the initial publication date. After this initial 14-day refresh period, the periodic refresh schedule for older content varies based on the platform, published date, and any related boosting activity on the post.

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