Chris Harris HOW TO Track Social Media Traffic in Google Analytics

HOW TO Track Social Media Traffic in Google Analytics

If you use Google Analytics, you’ve undoubtedly seen a report like this:

Google Analytics Pie Chart

The problem is, there’s no breakdown of “social media” in this view of traffic sources, and with the dramatic rise of social media marketing, marketers need an easy way to segment and “see” this traffic separately from the rest of their referrers. We know it’s mixed in with “referring sites” and “direct traffic” but luckily, there’s a way to extract that data in just a few simple steps.

Step 1: Create a Custom Segment

Custom segments are the way to go for separating traffic into filter-able buckets for deeper analysis. GA makes this fairly painless:

From any of the “Traffic Sources” sections, just click the “Advanced Segments” in the upper-right hand corner and then the link to “Create a new advanced segment.”

Step 2: Add Social Sources

This is the most crucial part, and requires that you have a full list of the sites/words to include. Don’t just use the domain names or URLs of the most popular social sites, but instead, use clever “catch-all” words using the “source” condition, as shown below:

Make sure to continue adding “OR” statements, not “and” statements - the latter will require that both conditions are met vs. any one of the “ORs”. Here’s a few examples, but you can add as many as what’s relevant:

twitter
tweetdeck
facebook
linkedin
youtube
reddit
digg
delicious
stumbleupon
ycombinator
flickr
myspace
hootsuite
popurls
wikipedia
bitly

Depending on your niche, it might be valuable to run through your top 2-500 referring domains looking for any obvious matches. You could also refer to Wikipedia’s list of popular social sites.

Step 3: Test & Name Your Segment

In order to create a fully functional segment, you’ll want to test the logic you’ve created to be sure results are returning. Before you do that, though, GA requires naming your segment (e.g. “social media”):

Once it’s complete and working properly, click “save segment.” You’ll be returned to the prior screen with the segment ready to rumble.

Step 4: Filter Traffic by “Social Media”

Your new segment is ready to be applied. You can now filter social media exclusively or see it in comparison to other traffic sources on any report in GA. Just use the advanced segments drop-down and choose “social media” under the custom segments list like so:

Segmenting social traffic is useful for reporting, particularly to gauge value (if you have action tracking on commercial activities set up in GA, for example) and see growth/impact over time. But, there’s more you can learn than just raw traffic and conversions numbers.

Here’s some examples of reports to look at, along with the value from the data:

Once broken out, you can compare referring social media sites more easily. If you then compare this against traffic “opportunity” from these sites (using a combination of traffic data and gut check), you’ll be able to find which sites have the greatest chance to improve.

This next chart compares search vs. social traffic over time:

If looking to evaluate progress and make comparisons, this view is fairly useful. You can see that the effort in social is paying off and also having an effect on search engine traffic too (through new links, citations, etc).

Next, the level of engagement of social media visitors:

Naturally you can compare engagement as a result of social referrals to search or direct traffic, but it is also handy to watch as you make tweaks to your site to encourage greater engagement and click-through to see if those efforts are successful.

Last, let’s look at the pages social visitors see:

These are all potential opportunities to create more customized landing experiences based on the referrer path, and the report can also give me insight about what content I need to continue producing if I want to draw in more social traffic.

If social media marketing is a focus of your organization, segmenting that traffic in reporting is critical to determining the value of your efforts and improving. So get into GA, segment, and start seeing your traffic for what it really is.

Original post via SEOmoz