Ultimate Guide To Track Social Media Traffic In Google Analytics

Social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram have their own analytics that help businesses understand their performance in these channels. To tailor for more insights and dig-in for more information about your presence and performance on these social media channels, Google Analytics is where you should be.

For SEO professionals, Google Analytics has been like mentor throughout the SEO journey providing loads of insights about the website performance, traffic and conversions. Google Analytics is the best tool is analyze your social media KPIs, channels that are driving more traffic & conversions, and generated data would continuously help your business to increase your performance. Let’s take a quick tour, understanding in which way Google Analytics helps us track social media traffic.

Overview

Social Media traffic data comes under “Acquisition”. Just log-in to Google Analytics, Go to Reporting >> Acquisition >> Social.

In case, you are not having Google Analytics account for your website, it will just takes few minutes to sign up, Check out how to setup account now.

Overview simply gives a glimpse of traffic coming from different social channels. It clearly shows Social Value Graph that highlights, total number of sessions and conversions including all those sessions and conversions that are social referrals. In overview report, you can have a glance on social sources along with number of sessions and web pages that are gaining traffic.

Network Referrals

When people like your content on social media, they do share and eventually traffic pours in. Having track of what social channels are performing for your website, how many sessions are being acquired; all that data in displayed in Network Referrals report. It also gives information on sessions, page views, avg sessions duration, pages per sessions and more.

Landing Pages

Users visit pages through social media, each and every detail about performance on these pages will be reported here. You can get track which URL post has been working on social media, which kind of content people like to read and every such detail that would help you build apt content strategy for your social media.

Conversions

After, goals are setup this section gives data that will help you improvise marketing strategy. If you haven’t set up goals in Google Analytics, you should because conversions focuses on people that are actually converting apart from data just about traffic and demographics. Now, conversion factor may vary from business to business, so while creating a goal make sure it includes your online goals and also benefits your online growth.

With conversion report in social, you can actually anticipate the importance of social media for your business and these reports will help you identify whether or not social media platforms are driving traffic and customers to your business. This report will display number of conversions acquired through social referrals and their monetary value.

Plugins

Do you have share buttons on your website? So knowing how many are sharing your content through these buttons is always beneficial, isn’t? Plugins would give data about how many times visitors have clicked on social share buttons and the pages that are shared most. To track this data, you need include additional tracking code; Learn more from Help Center.

Users Flow

Users Flow is the best part of tracking social traffic on Google Analytics, it shows the path of the visitor from social media sites to your website. It is generally useful to see how your social referred visitors are travelling on your website, from first webpage to another and how many of them are leaving the website. This report is mostly useful when you want to track your website traffic during any social media campaigns.

Google Analytics gives data that is helpful to understand your audience and your performance over web. Monitoring each step of your brand building, traffic and conversions attained through social media is only possible with Google Analytics. We hope this guide was helpful in tracking your social traffic, send in your views!

About the author 

Jeremy Ley

Jeremy Ley went from struggling, slaving away at the J-O-B as wireless sales rep to starting and running a successful digital marketing business.  In his spare time he enjoys the digital lifestyle, working out, and writing incredible bios. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}