Guide To Tracking Social Media In Google Analytics

Imagen de Blue Fountain Media bajo licencia CC BY 2.0

Your website is the cornerstone of your business’ online presence. Alongside your website is its helpful sister, social media. Your social media and website presence should be integrated with one another in order to continuously drive traffic to your online assets. And with social media driving traffic to your site, the next step is measuring your efforts so you can improve. As always, this is where Google Analytics comes handy.

Google Analytics provides you with data to see where your website visitors come from and understand your visitors’ behavior on your site. Additionally, when you setup your Google Analytics account to track and measure your social media initiatives, you’ll then be able to adequately prove the ROI of social media for your business.

To get you started, we’ve put together this guide to tracking social media in Google Analytics in 6 easy steps.
Step 1: Create social media objectives and goals for your website

Before you can begin tracking your social media initiatives in Google Analytics you need to create social media objectives and goals. These objectives and goals should be part of your overall social media marketing plan and should be aligned with your broader marketing and business strategy. If your objective is to use social media to increase website traffic, then create S.M.A.R.T. goals that will help you achieve that objective.



For example: To increase website traffic by 15% in Q2, 100 Tweets a month will be dedicated to driving traffic to the website.
Step 2: Sign up for Google Analytics

This step is extremely important if you want to track social media in Google Analytics. It’s important that you have a Google Analytics account to access your website traffic reports. Create a new Google Analytics account, if you don’t have one. Visit google.com/analytics, click Sign in to Google Analytics or Create an account button on the top right hand corner, and follow the on-screen instructions.


Step 3: Setup your Google Analytics tracking code

In order to gather website data from Google Analytics you need to first setup your tracking code. There are two ways to collect page tracking data: Google Tag Manageror by adding the tracking code directly to your site.

1) Google Tag Manager

This approach is recommended because using Google Tag Manager simplifies tag management on your site. It makes it easier to add other tags, such as AdWords Conversion Tracking and remarketing tags, to your site and configure Google Analytics tracking. Follow the steps in the video below to setup Google Tag Manager.



2) Adding the tracking code directly to your site

In order to do this you first must have access to your website’s source code and be comfortable editing HTML.

To set up the web tracking code:
Sign in to your Google Analytics account, select the Admin tab. From the Account and property columns, select the property you’re working with. Click Tracking Info > Tracking code.


Copy the snippet. It starts with <script> and ends with </script>. Make sure to not reuse the same tracking code snippet on multiple domains.
Paste your snippet into every webpage you want to track, and paste it before the closing </head> tag.
Check your setup to make sure the code shown in Google Analytics is the same that is on your website’s source code.
Step 4: Setup Google Analytics Goals

Tracking the true effectiveness of social media for your business goes beyond pageviews and visits. Finding out if social media actually helps your business is more important if you’re trying to prove the ROI of social media. Knowing important metrics like: product sign ups, leads, downloads, and newsletter signups, will help you solidify the importance of social media for your business.

To create Goals follow these steps by Google Analytics.
Step 5: Understanding Social Analytics Reports

There are 8 Social Analytics reports available in Google Analytics. These reports will help you understand the impact and effectiveness of your social media initiatives. You can find these reports under the Reporting tab > Acquisition > Social.



1) Overview report

This report allows you to see a glance into how much conversion value is generated from social channels. The social value graph compares the number and monetary value of all goal completions versus those that are from social referrals.



2) Network referrals

This report will provide you with engagement metrics for traffic from each social network. It will show you which social networks referred the highest quality traffic.

3) Data Hub Activity

The Data Hub Activity report shows you how people are talking about and engaging with your site content on social networks. You’ll be able to see the most recent URLs people shared, how they shared it, and what they said.



4) Landing pages

This report allows you to see engagement metrics for each URL. Each URL will show you the originating social networks for that URL.



5) Trackbacks

In this report you’ll be able to know which sites are linking to your content, and in which context. You can use this data to replicate successful content and build relationships with those who frequently link to your site.



6) Conversions

This report is the report where you can really quantify the value of social media for your business. The Conversions report will show the total number of conversions and the monetary value of conversions that occurred as a result of referrals from each network. Note: Step 4 must be completed in order for this report to be populated with data.



7) Plugins

If you have social share buttons on your site it’s important to understand which buttons are being clicked on and for which content. This report provides you with the data necessary to know which articles are most commonly shared, and from which social networks they’re being shared on.



8) Users flow

The Users Flow reports shows the initial paths that users from social networks took through your site. If you run campaigns that promote specific products, you can see whether users from each social network entered your site through a product page and whether or not they continued to other parts of your website.


Step 6: Reporting on the data from these reports

Now that you have the data that you need to showcase how your social media initiatives is driving traffic to your website; compile the necessary data and present it to your boss in either a PowerPoint or Google Presentation. Make sure to only include the data that aligns back to the goals you initially created in Step 1. Your presentation should include graphs and 2-3 sentences explaining what each graph means to your business.

For example, if you want to show how social media is doing in driving traffic to your website you can create a graph that compares it to other source channels, like the graph below, then talk about how owned and organic social channels are driving the most traffic to your website.



We hope this 6 step guide to tracking social media in Google Analytics helps gets you started on the right track to proving social media ROI. Just remember to always be: tracking, measuring, analyzing, and improving, in order to constantly improve your business’s online assets.

 QUICK GUIDE TO MEASURING CONTENT MARKETING EFFORTS

Simply put, if you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing. In fact, if you’re whipping up blog posts and infographics without business objectives, you’re basically partaking in a very expensive version of arts and crafts.

Your job as a content marketer is to show your boss the money — not traffic, not links — mon-naay.

Let’s talk about how to get started effectively measuring your content marketing efforts.

MEASUREMENT SEPARATES DIGITAL MARKETING FROM TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING

As a native Philadelphian (I live in Brooklyn now), I know a little too much about John Wanamaker.

Most people in marketing and advertising know him for this quote:

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

However, this sentiment does not hold true for digital marketing.

If an action happens online, it can likely be measured. You need a plan to effectively measure the tasks that impact your business goals.

If you do this right and pay attention, you’ll be able to identify content marketing tasks that aren’t benefitting your business goals.

Unfortunately, there are a good portion of people that appear to be asleep at the wheel.

According to a poll by Oracle Marketing Cloud, many in-house professionals believe that it’s difficult to measure your content marketing’s return on investment (ROI).

In fact, I’ve seen numerous studies make this declaration.

Let’s just be clear right now — that’s poppycock!

VANITY METRICS DON’T MEAN MUCH

Instead of analyzing the true factors that affect your business, many people focus on vanity metrics when measuring content marketing effectiveness.

Here are some of those vanity metrics and a brief description of why they aren’t good measures of content marketing ROI by themselves:

• Traffic: Knowing the number of visitors that came to a website is not an indicator that you reached a business goal. For example, you could spend $1,000 on StumbleUpon Paid Discovery and get 10,000 people to visit your blog post in the next 30 minutes, but more than 90 percent of those people won’t read a single word beyond the headline. When someone excitedly announces, “We got more traffic this month!” the only response that makes sense is, “Cool. What did that traffic do for us?”
• Search rankings: It’s difficult to tell if search rankings drive traffic, and even if they do, once again you have to be able to quantify how the traffic actually helped your business goals.
• Social shares: Just because someone shared your content doesn’t mean that he actually visited the page or that any of his followers will visit the page.
• Impressions and reach: Similar to rankings, impressions and reach are indicators of possibility. They are not indications of whether or not people saw or consumed your content. It’s the equivalent of saying people in cars are carefully paying attention to the billboards they drive past and taking specific actions because of them.
• Page views: A page view doesn’t inherently mean the user took any action that benefits your business.

For most aspects of your business, these vanity metrics are simply indicators of possibility — not true indicators of action or even interest.

BUSINESS METRICS VS. CHANNEL METRICS

There are a number of great measurement frameworks out there.

At iPullRank, we typically refer to two distinct segments: business metrics and channel metrics.

Business metrics have a direct impact on the company’s performance. They are often referred to as a subset of “business intelligence.”

Examples are:

• Number of leads
• Amount of revenue generated
• Customer lifetime value
• Cost per acquisition
• Churn rate

Your content marketing efforts should impact these metrics.

They’re the metrics that get you your bonus! And they’re the metrics your boss cares about.

Channel metrics are the levers you directly control that impact those business metrics.

Examples of channel metrics are:

• Conversion rates per channel
• Personas visiting per channel
• Scroll depth of content per channel
• Traffic per channel

Ultimately, these are the metrics that you can impact through direct and specific on-site changes.

THE PROCESS FOR MEASURING CONTENT MARKETING

Let’s walk through your first steps of measurement planning.

1. Determine your business goals
Are you looking to generate more leads, sell more products, or perhaps grow your email list? Knowing your business goals will help you determine conversion values.

Be careful with business goals, however. Although you may just be responsible for one certain channel, those channel metrics arenot business goals. For example, “increase Facebook Likes” is not a business goal. Driving more conversions from Facebook traffic is a business goal.

2. Determine your audience
Who are you speaking to with your content? How do they align with what can be tracked by your current setup? What features make up an audience segment? These answers help you determine the value of your traffic.

You can specifically do this in Google Analytics by creating advanced segmentsleveraging data from Demographics and Interests reports.

3. Determine your channels
Where do you distribute your content? PPC? Social Media? Email? Display? Native Advertising? Each channel has its own measurable attributes.

4. Determine your tools
What tools do you have at your disposal for measurement? Google Analytics? Or other channel-specific analytics, as well?

5. Determine your key performance indicators (KPIs)
The combination of your channels and your tools determine your KPIs. Based on your goals and the data available to you, what will you use to determine the effectiveness of the effort? What is a conversion?

Once you’ve done all this, you’ll have several business metric KPIs that look like this:

Now you know what to focus on so you can start measuring your content marketing!

CONTENT MARKETING MEASUREMENT ISN’T HARD AFTER ALL

Measurement requires deliberate thought and alignment of your efforts with your goals.

So let’s all stop doing arts and crafts.

Let’s illustrate how our content is truly making businesses mon-naay!