Image courtesy of Flickr
Since 2008, social media usage is rising rapidly. With rapid changes in technology and quick adoption by the masses; currently, social media is being used by 90% of young adults aged between 18-29 and 77% of adults aged between 30-49 of American Population. Still, if you are not measuring social media marketing; you are undervaluing its impacts. By measuring, it means the way you analyze social media traffic.This traffic can be tracked in google analytics, which categorizes into different channels.
There are a lot of ways how you can track social media traffic in google analytics to see the impact it has on your website traffic and conversions. You can also track the amount of leads generated by social media and determine the most engaging social media site to put more efforts.
Leads Generated Via Social Media
If you are spending enough time and efforts doing social media marketing, you would be curious to determine the number of leads generated via social media.
Let’s begin with google analytics and determine the users who visited your site via social media and later, at any time, they visited your site again and completed a goal (purchased a product or viewed content).
Step#1: Login to your google analytics account and select specific property
Step#2: Goto reporting dashboard
Step#3: Create Segment
Step#3: Head over to advanced segment and select the sequential segment and do as shown in the below image.
- Select include from the first drop down menu.
- By default, the filter is applied to session level which displays all the sessions. You have to apply this filter on user level.
- Step one is our first condition where we select the options; ‘’source’’ ‘’contains’’ ‘’facebook’’.
- Do not change the fourth step and let it be as default.
- In the fifth step, there is a second condition where we set ‘’goal 19 per user’’ greater ‘’>’’ than 0. You can change this goal according to your requirement.
- Click apply to view this data.
To determine all visitors from social sites who converted, change the ad content in the first step to “medium” and enter social in the field.
You can either create the above segment by yourself or click on the button below to directly import this segment to your analytics account.
Tracking Social Media Campaigns
Whether you are running a discount campaign or special winter campaign, you can keep track of the traffic it generates in google analytics. You can either use AdWords campaigns or use UTM parameters for tracking specific campaigns.
Once you have started a campaign on any social media platform, you can see results in analytics. You can then segment those visitors who actually converted and who left after visiting your site.
The campaign data can be viewed in google analytics by navigating to Acquisition >> Campaign >> All Campaigns.
If you want to see the number of visitors who converted from the above reports, you can create a new segment. Once you started your marketing campaigns, the next step is to measure the success of your marketing campaign.
Google Analytics Social Reports
Another way to look at social media conversions are the social reports in google analytics. These reports can be easily accessed even if you don’t have much experience with google analytics. You can view these reports by navigating to Acquisition >> Social >> Conversions.
The above reports show conversions from each social media sites within the given date range.
Popular Content On Social Channels
In google analytics, you can also view the content that is popular on your social media. To do this, navigate to Behavior >> behavior flow in your analytics reporting tab. By default, these reports are set to landing pages only, however, you can select different dimension to view different reports.
To view popular content on social media, change landing page to medium from the dropdown.
Next, click on social medium and select Highlight traffic through here
The end result would look like the image below.
The above report displays a fair amount of data to think about your social media marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Google analytics is the best tool you can use to understand the behavior of your social media traffic. It is up to you, how you understand the data and improve your marketing strategy to get more out of social media. Tools provided by each social media platform will not allow you to analyze the difference in impact from different social media platforms. If you wish to analyze which social mediums are the most effective for your business and which combination of social media platforms should be used to spend advertising expenditure, then google analytics will help you in analyzing all the social media platforms for your business.
