The Canvs Impact Engine℠ explores the relationship between emotions and business outcomes. 

The Canvs Impact Engine℠ (CIE) is a patent-pending technology that automatically identifies statistically significant correlations between Canvs-detected emotions and relevant business KPIs on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

This functionality makes it possible to understand how emotions play a role in what fans are clicking, viewing and sharing.

The emotion identified as most significantly positively or negatively correlating with a KPI is termed the Impact Emotion.

CIE works in three steps:

Canvs Impact Engine℠ (CIE) collects the emotional content of the comments on each Facebook post, as well as the desired KPIs (e.g. Shares). CIE focuses analysis on emotions that appear frequently (more than 1% of the reaction volume) for each page.

Using Forward Stagewise Regression, we identify a sequence of emotions (through the estimated LARS coefficient path), in order of how important that emotion is in predicting (log-transformed) #KPI. The result is an ordered set of emotions. The basic idea is that emotions that have higher (partial) covariance to log-transformed #KPI will be entered into the model first. The most important emotion is referred to as the Impact Emotion and either positively or negatively predicts the KPI.

CIE runs two checks before producing results to ensure accuracy. First, CIE runs a part vs. whole "gut check" to ensure that the algorithm is performing reasonably. For example, if Love is positively driving shares, then CIE confirms that the most loved posts also have more shares than the median, as would be expected.

Second, CIE calculates a magnitude score, which uses shrinkage estimation and assesses the extent to which 1% increase of the impact emotion would affect log-transformed KPI. For example, if Love is positively driving shares, CIE then calculates that for every 1% increase in Love, there’s an X% increase in shares.

The Canvs Impact Engine℠ automatically generates new insights over genres every week on Monday. It starts by analyzing all posts from the prior week. If insights are identified, CIE then looks across the previous 30 days to determine if the identified emotion has consistently been impactful for driving KPIs. Within the Canvs dashboard for Owned Facebook, these are labeled as "Trend Alerts". 

Example of CIE Trend Alerts for impactful Emotions

Currently, the Canvs Impact Engine℠ is available for all Owned Facebook Content pages in Canvs. Simply navigate to a Facebook content page, then select the leftmost tab labeled "Impact".