Social Media App For Your Toolbar

Using social networking sites is one of the quickest way to get traffic. Between Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, LinkedIn and Stumble Upon to name a few, it is difficult to know which site gets you the most clicks. Time is money, so you cannot afford to spend time on sites that do not get results.

If you use Google Analytics to track your site stats, you can use campaign tagging to easily see which links are getting the most traffic on each social network. You can do this by adding parameters to the URL after an ampersand or question mark. If you want to break it down even further, if you have two accounts on the same social networking site for example, you can use two parameters. Do this by using a question mark before the first parameter and an ampersand before each additional parameter.

Quick Tagger Tool

InMotion Hosting has a free tool, Quick Tagger, that automatically adds parameters to your link, which takes the guesswork out of creating the URL. The tool is simple and takes only seconds to generate both the long URL with parameters and a shortened URL to use on Twitter or email.

To use the tool, simply drag the link to your browser’s bookmark bar. When you want to generate a link, click the link and a small window pops up for you to fill out the parameters and click the button to see your link. It will display the long URL and a shortened URL that points to the same page with the same parameters.

Setting Parameters

Quick Tagger lets you input three variables: source, medium and campaign. Use these variables to differentiate between different accounts on various social networking sites and email campaigns.

The source is the site or network you use to post the link, e.g., Twitter, email newsletter or Facebook.The medium is your account name for that particular site. This is helpful if you have multiple email lists or user accounts on one site.

The campaign parameter is the only one that can be used for more than one source or medium. Use the same campaign value when marketing one product among different sources to see which sites yield the best results.

Interpreting Results

To see your results, log into your Google Analytics account. Click on Traffic Sources, then Sources. Finally, click on Campaigns. The results of your new URLs with parameters will be listed so you can easily see which campaigns give you the greatest return. This lets you view traffic by social network alone to see which followers are engaging the most with your account. You can further break it down by account if you have more than one account on the same site. For the campaign parameter, you can see which products generate the most interest regardless of social networking site to learn how to market future products to your followers.

 

Juliana is a Marketing Specialist for InMotion Hosting, a Web Hosting Company based in Los Angeles. You can follow her on Twitter @JulianaPayson.

Image Credit: gallagher.michaelsean, Rosa Say

 

 

Posted on: March 21, 2012