Social media &
Measuring Your Social Media Success with Google Analytics
Filed under: Google, Social Media, Surveys and stats, Tools
I am a bit of a stats nut. If not interrupted I can play with stats forever. But for people less obsessed with numbers here’s something that might help you get a better understanding of the value of your social media program. (Some images are scaled down so click on them to get a better view).
Social media segment
Google Analytics has a feature called Advandced segments. This lets you define custom segment of visits selected by the referrer.
I will show you how to create a Google Analytics custom segment that tracks visitors from social media channels. First, click open the advanced segments and select Create a new advanced segment.
This takes you to a screen where you can select the parameters for your segment. To select social media channels for your report you will
- open the Traffic Sources from Dimensions section.
- From Traffic Sources drag the Source to your segment area.
- Set Condition to Contains and
- in the Value field type in text that identifies one of your social channels.
- Click Add “or” statement as needed.
In the image below I have identified the most important social media channels but you may want to add special channels that are relevant to you. For example industry forums and blogs or local social media networking sites in your country.
Now, you can do this by hand for practicing reasons but here’s a link that will copy this advanced segment directly into your Google Analytics account.
UPDATE!
Seems that Google has screwed that up a bit. I found a work around for now:
1. Log into Google Analytics
2. Switch to old version
3. Go to Advanced segments
4. Click the links in this post
Worked for me. I’ll try to find out if there’s any other way with the new Analytics interface. But seems that they have even removed the share button. Go figure!
Name segment and click Test Segment to verify that everything is working. This will show you how many visits each part of the segment contains.
If you have more than one Google Analytics account then you can select the where the segment is available from Visible in drop down list. Now you can click Save and Apply to Report and you will see the statistics for only this segment.
Later when you want to apply the segment to your statistics you can select it from any page within Google Analytics by selecting it from the drop down menu on the top right corner.
You can select several segments at once and compare the performance as shown in this image.
Comparing visitor numbers is a good indication if your efforts are bearing fruit in general. But to get more insight out of these reports you should analyze how are social media visitors interacting with your site and converting to goals.
Some people haven’t set up goals in their Google Analytics, they should go here How to Setup Goals in Google Analytics and follow instructions. But you can go to your Goal section and see how are social media visitors converting compared to your average visitor.
On the next image you can see that Dreamgrow website gets 37 percent of its conversions from social media channels.
Well… this is great news as we only get 21 percent of traffic from social channels. This reflects on the conversion rate that is 77% higher for the visitors from social media.
The most important question in analytics is So what? and the blindingly obvious conclusion from this example is that social media works in getting the goals we need. There are a lot of ways you can play around with this segment but for us the next question is how do we get more visitors from social media channels to our site? For that:
- select only your Social media segment and
- go Content part of Google Analytics.
- Select Top Landing Pages.
This report will show you what are the main entry points for visitors from social media. We can say that these are the pieces of content the have most potential to spread. Create more similar content, repost old content, create videos or slide shows from popular material.
I hope this helps you to get more insight out of your social media marketing program and one step closer to that all important social media ROI.
Read the related post HOW-TO: Tag Social Media Links for Google Analytics and Outbond Links are Gold.
Posted on: May 3, 2011
Like you said , I love stats and can spend days analyzing them.
Also great for confusing the boss copy and paste states into a report Show alot of charts with trending upwards.
Thanks for the Tip.
P.S Following you on Twitter and loving the tweets.
Thanks Mike. It’s really good to get feedback and I hope this post will give some value to readers.
Excellent article, Priit. Love the framing towards social communities.
Landing Pages are god. Oh, wait, that was Clapton.
Thanks! Followed it step by step, and now I have the social media broken out on my analytics. So easy!
Thanks for your comment. I hope you can get some value out of it, Marc.
This was very useful. I really appreciate that I’m able to use a tool such as Google Analytics to gather information, analyze and track my online traffic to say the least. One more report to add to my arsenal, yay! Thanks for sharing.
Thank you Google Analytics!
(honestly, I’m still trying to figure all this analytics stuff out….remember, I’m OLD!)
L.O.L!
Kind Regards,
Karen
great notes
After reading your post I have immediately created a segment in my Google Analytics account.
Very good insight on how to measure social marketing efforts. However, it can not measure 100% impact created through our efforts. It can just tell about people who have landed on our website through social updates.
Results given by Google Analytics concerning Social Media trafic should be taken with a bit of salt, to say the least.
As Baekdal proved here : http://www.baekdal.com/media/dont-trust-your-social-referral-data/
Excellent point Stef! A lot of social traffic comes in as direct but measuring the other part is important as it gives you insights into the behavior of visitors from social channels.
One way to get more info is to tag the links that you put into social media sites. This way some of the directs (not all) resolve into more meaningful data.
The information from social segment is valuable but you have to understand the limitations.
im interested but still confused
Pingback: Outbound Links are Gold | DreamGrow Social Media
Pingback: HOW-TO: Tag Social Media Links for Google Analytics | DreamGrow Social Media
Here’s my answer to Stef’s problem. As close to 100% as possible http://www.dreamgrow.com/how-to-tag-social-media-links-for-google-analytics/
This is great. I never would have thought to set up metrics this way – and haven’t read anything similar yet before! So many how-to posts are often just reworded content with nothing new to say. Nice clear step-by-step instructions, too. Thanks.
Thanks, Tia! I found that just playing around with social media is not enough. You need results. This is one way to show that it really is valuable.
Thanks for sharing this awesome article
Thank you!
rate of return (ROR), also known as return on investment (ROI), rate of profit or sometimes just return, is the ratio
Superb tip. Love the pre-selected segment profile via the click.
Thanks Neil! Here’s another one that might be helpful “Not search” http://bit.ly/vTLAPA
Am I going mad here. Whenever I click on your link, ‘copy this advanced segment directly into your Google Analytics account’ it just takes me to my Accounts list. I am already logged in, I only have one account. When I look in Advanced Segments it isn’t there. Help!
Seems that Google has screwed that up a bit. I found a work around for now:
1. Log into Google Analytics
2. Switch to old version
3. Go to Advanced segments
4. Click the links in this post
Worked for me. I’ll try to find out if there’s any other way with the new Analytics interface. But seems that they have even removed the share button. Go figure!
I don’t know about this way thanks to learn how we can Google Analytic in our social media sites and check our visitor earn money. if you have other technique that help me to promote my social media profile.
That’s a great post. I have been using google analytic.But i didnt know that Im able to do all these..
thank you for this amazing guidline,
i have created this for my blog facebook apps information..
Dear friend, I tried to have your tutorial, but no data was displayed. I have to put the Analytics tags on the Facebook page, as I do that?
Paulo, you get a custom segment that you can use within Google Analytics.