Once you are active within social networks you need to determine how you are performing and calculate your ROI (Return On Investment). Google Analytics allows you to measure metrics for visitors accessing your site from social networks in quantitative terms, but it is also important to understand the qualitative value of your efforts.
Bearing in mind the metric that wants to be measured using Google Analytics, it's possible to determine how well we are performing; although with social media in quantitative terms we need to be careful and do not forget that also we are measuring qualitative results. Some of the best practices when measuring the results for social media traffic include the definition of goals associated with the traffic from social networks, and the loyalty reports.
The next are some example of social media tools that have become famous for marketing strategies and with the use of Google Analytics we can see from which social media tool our visitors are referred (e.g twitter.com, digg.com, facebook.com)
1. Flickr
If you have an account in Flickr and do you want to use it for marketing, it's useful not only adding pictures but also making comments about them that contribute to a discussion about the product or service offered. It is recommended create groups for specific topics and invite clients to join them.
To help that people find you on Flickr when they use Search Engines, it is useful to tag the pictures with relevant keywords and descriptions. It is also important to create a profile that helps people to recognise you and find useful the information that you share.
2. Facebook
In the last years Facebook has become very useful for different purposes that are not limited to share pictures and update our status in a social meida site. Lots of businesses advertise in Facebook, and have created their own account to answer questions, keep in touch with clients and create online marketing comunities that can be classified by city, region, workplace, and school.
3. Twitter
Twitter helps to gain attention for the business, improve traffic, address people to your business and build partnerships in a easy and cheap way because everything you tweet (links, text, images) in your profile is seen by people that is following you. Having a twitter account increase the probability of being found in Search Engines.
Although by default GA shows that the source is comming from twitter.com, it's possible to add the GA's campaigns with the tracking parameter and convert it in a small URL using tools like tinyURL.com
Options to check social media traffic in Google Analytics
- By default GA recognise the source from the visitors are coming; therefore, making use of advanced segmentation is possible to compare metrics of all visits with those generated by social network tools (twitter.com, facebook.com, digg.com...). The next are the steps to follow:
- Click in Manage Advanced Segments
- Click in the linck +Create new custom segment
- Drag the Dimension "Source" to the "add or segment"
- In the condition choose "Matches Exaclty"
- In the value field insert all the Social Media tools from where your site can get traffic (e.g. twitter.com)
- Add "or" statment
- Then repeat step 5 & 6 until you have entered all the Social Media sources.
- Click in Test Segment
- Click in Create Segment
- Start comparing other metrics in your reports with this segment.
This option is easy to implement but every time that you identify a new social media traffic source, it has to be added to the segment. Can be possible to use the Condition "Contains" instead of "Matches exactly" because sometimes the traffic is generated from subdomains such as uk.facebook.com.
- Other option is to create filters for the social media traffic generated.
The advantage of creating a filter for the social media sites is that you can dintiguish from the other referral links. In order to create the filter that match all the social networks from where we want to group we need to use regular expressions (a little bit similar to the advanced segment).
- Go to the profile where you want to add the filter (Remember the filters affects the profile where they are applied)
- Click in Edit
- In the section "Filters applied to Profile" click in +Add Filter
- Select "add new Filter for Profile"
- Enter a name for the filter (e.g. Social Media Traffic)
- Select Filter Type "Custom Filter" Advanced
- For Field A -> Extract A select Campaign Source and in the field text write all the social media sources you want to group in this filter divided by "|" (e.g. filckr.com|twitter.com|facebook.com)
- For Otuput To -> Constructor select Campaign Medium and write the name that you want to re-label for this referral in the text field (e.g Social Media)
- Click in Save Changes
- Another option is to add the plugin created by VKI Studios that reports automatically the social media sources.
The steps are very simmilar to the other Grasemonkey plugins.
- Install Greasemonky in your Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748)
- Restart Firefox
- Install VKI script (http://blog.vkistudios.com/downloads/greasemonkey/smmPluginForGA/1.2/smmPluginForGA.user.js)
- Log in to the GA account and check the Content Detail report for example.
Note that this option only works for firefox.
