Introduction
Social media marketing has demonstrated strength in virtually every
area of business model and business size to which it has been applied. The ability to interact with brand audiences in ways that are entertaining, informative and personalized has increased strong relationship building between online businesses and their customers.
More than half of small businesses report sales increase within the first couple of years of active social media marketing, with that increasing to nearly 75% which report consistent return on their social media marketing investment after 5 years.
Managing your social media campaign can present many challenges for businesses just getting started with their social media marketing launches. While affordable web design and a good web design company can get your business an online presence, social media marketing requires talent which can at times appear daunting.
Fortunately, Google Analytics can provide a wide range of website performance and interaction metrics which can help demystify many aspects of the social media campaign process.
In this article, we discuss 5 ways in which Google Analytics provides assistance with managing your social media marketing efforts.
1. Audience Demographics
New social media marketing campaigns may not yet have core data about their audience makeup. Google Analytics provides several key pieces of data to assist with identifying these groups.
Google Analytics provides information about the age, gender and geographic location of your audience. Insights offered by this data include an international breakdown of your audience as well as valuable marketing data related to age range and gender by percentages.
This data can further assist with tuning your social media campaign’s message to address the needs and concerns of these segments as well as provide valuable feedback related to populations where your brand could use strengthening.
2. Acquisition Metrics
Acquisition data is extremely important data which allows you to view how customers are reaching your site. The breakdown includes figures showing link backs from the site of origin such as social media sites and search engine result clicks.
Knowing where your audience is coming from can assist you with decision-making knowledge about the performance of your different social media campaigns, which in turn can provide strategic insight for future campaign efforts.
3. Visitor Insights
Behavior metrics shows visitor time spent by page, bounce rate and which pages of your website users are interacting most with.
Having this information, can help you with determining which pages are the most popular and how long your visitors are interacting with those pages. The data suggests areas to increase campaign efforts and strengthen or eliminate areas which are not productive to the goals of your marketing campaign.
4. Visitor Flow
Behavior flow is related information which shows you the paths which users navigate your website including the pages on which the users most frequently land, which pages they navigate to afterwards and which page they leave your website from most frequently.
Having this information is invaluable to increasing user retention as it necessarily points out areas where the visitors most frequently show strong interest as well as those areas in which they lose interest in your website.
This information can also assist with understanding visitor conversion metrics, whether they equate to purchase decisions, creating an account, downloading an eBook, posting to a blog or subscribing to your newsletter.
5. Reporting Tools
Google Analytics also offers information packed social media analytics reports which provides key social value information in visual format. This data assists you with interpreting conversion and assisted and last interaction data and back tracing which social media campaigns have been most valuable in assisting with your conversions.
Conclusion
Getting started with social media marketing can be a little intimidating initially for those new to online marketing. However, Google Analytics offers many insights into user interactions with your website to demystify the performance of your social media campaign.
If your curiosity has been piqued, follow this google analytics guide which will get you started with using analytics.
