Social Media Monitoring with Google Analytics

Measure the success of your social media marketing with the help of social media monitoring in Google Analytics.

There are plenty of features in Google Analytics that most users never bother learning about. One of the major categories where many of these features exist when it comes to social media monitoring. You can monitor a ton of social media data using Google Analytics – and there is so much built in that even beginners can do it!

Below are a few ways you can use Google Analytics to monitor traffic from your social media accounts and measure the success of certain social media programs while determining ways in which to improve on others to capitalize on all that social media has to offer when it comes to getting found.

1. Identify the Sources of Your Social Traffic

Watching the visits counter on Google Analytics can be extremely rewarding when you start to see the numbers rise. But in order to incorporate these results into your strategies, you need to know where this traffic is coming from. Luckily, Google Analytics has a feature built in that shows you the sources of this traffic, including social media. In your dashboard, on the left hand side, you’ll see the Traffic Sources tab. Under there, you’ll see two areas that will help you determine which social networks are driving traffic: Sources and Social.

To take it one step further, under your Sources menu, you can search by Referrals to see exactly which sites are driving traffic, and to narrow it down by social alone, you can select the Network Referrals tab underneath Social.

Knowing the sources of your social media referral traffic will help you do two things. First, you will able to see which social media networks are driving the most referral traffic to your corporate site. Second, you will be able to see where your social media efforts need improvement in order to drive increased traffic from those networks. One tip that will help is if you look at your Content tab in Google Analytics. It is there that you will be able to see which pages are being viewed the most, and, with a little tweaking, you will be able to see what the sources of the traffic on those individual pages are. If, say, you have a blog and notice that this is the most popular page on your site. If you see that much of your referral traffic to your blog is coming from LinkedIn but little comes from Twitter, you might want to consider promoting your blog a little more in Twitter.

2. Pay Attention to Mobile

As we all know, social media interaction on mobile devices is becoming increasingly popular; the numbers prove it. Therefore, it is important that we appeal to the mobile market be it from custom apps to mobile-friendly options on our websites. Now, while this should be a consideration, it is always important to do a cost-benefit analysis of any business decision. And in order for us to measure these benefits, we will need to measure how much of our social media traffic is coming from mobile.

In the Audience tab, there is a Mobile option. It is there that we can see what portion of our audience is coming from mobile.

To see if they are being driven via social referral, we need to create an advanced segment that segments only traffic from our social media networks. In order to do this, we follow a few simple steps from Google. First, we select Advanced Segments in the top left hand bar beneath the dashboard title. Then we create a new one inserting only those sources we wish to view. It should look something like this:

From there we can segment our mobile traffic to view only those hits coming from social referral on a mobile device.

3. Set Social Goals

Here is where things become a little more customized. In order to measure the success of certain social media campaigns using Google Analytics, you are going to need to set up Goals. Goals in Google Analytics can be a tremendously valuable tool. Not only can they help you see where you are finding success with social media campaigns, but you can also use them to measure ROI from social media. As we all know, ROI is the key to business decisions, and as marketers, we know that it is often the one mitigating factor when it comes to C-level decision-makers moving ahead with or shutting down social media programs.

Goals are set up in the Conversions tab of your Google Analytics dashboard. Under that heading, the first tab is Goals, where you can select the “Set up goals” option. Goals can range anywhere from a visitor downloading a white paper to making a purchase. It all depends on what you are defining as a conversion for a given campaign. Say for example we want to set up a simple goal whereby a conversion is made when a visitor from social media visits more than two pages. First we define the goal parameters.

Now that the goal has been defined, we can move on to segmenting the traffic so that only traffic vis social referral is measured for this particular goal. On the Overview page for our goals, we can select the advanced segment we defined earlier and apply it to any of our defined goals. After that, we can simply monitor the traffic coming from social that achieves the goal of multiple page visits.

These are just a few of the amazing things you can do with your Google Analytics account when it comes to monitoring your social media activity. There are plenty more – albeit slightly more complicated – features that can help you optimize every one of your social media channels.

Take a look at some of the social media traffic on your Google Analytics account and let us know if you have noticed anything particularly interesting in the comments below or on Twitter!