How to Track Social Media Traffic With Google Analytics

With the digital age taking over the traditional forms of marketing and sale, Google analytics has become a very handy tool to track all the important information like clicks, impressions and bounce rates. Along with that it also helps one know what is working for their brand and what is not. Google analytics gives a real-time picture of all your digital business activities.

Launched by Google in November of 2005, after acquiring Urchin, Google Analytics is a web analytics service that helps track and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand.

Apart from providing traffic updates, Google Analytics also helps get information about your social media activities and how they are helping build up traffic. With Google Analytics, you can get complete valuable insights about your visitors that find you via social media.

Why Use Social Media For Increasing Traffic?

Why Use Social Media For Increasing Traffic

A report has shown that the 42.3 % marketer believes that social media has a lot of impact on the business growth and sales as a result of which the social media spend by about 65% in the next five years.

Social media brings your business to a higher notch as it provides a direct connection with your audience where they can provide suggestions, give comments and help businesses improve.

While lots of brands are using social media they are not sure why and how to use their social media report, well a simple answer on how to measure the social media strategies is that they can track it through Google Analytics.

Why Track Social Media?

While social media is being used by business they just leave their social media to posting and do not take the pain to analyse it and track their social media. Well, there are lot of reasons why it is necessary to track the social media:

Why Track Social Media

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  • Through the social media stats you can understand which of your site pages are doing well and customers are paying more attention to, and which require improvement. This will help you improve your website and engage the audience more.
  • Social Media stats will help you understand your audience better. You will know how engaged your social media visitors are by the amount of time they spend on your site. It will help you improve your content and engage the audience for a longer duration.
  • Depending on your percentage of new vs old visitors you can also change your social media strategy. If you have more new visitors and the old ones are not returning, it is time to change your engagement strategy.
  • ROI: With Google Analytics you can see the return on investment through social media and work more on the platform for better returns.

Various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and many more can be used for social media promotions and marketing.  No matter which platform you use , tracking your social media is extremely important, and it is necessary that you know where you are going wrong and make corrections for the same.

View Your Social Media Traffic on Google Analytics

View Your Social Media Traffic on Google Analytics

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So get your hands on the social media traffic of your website through the Google Analytics, by following the below methods:

Step 1: On your browser search for Google Analytics and log into it through your username and password. From the top left corner select the website for which you want to see the social media report.

Step 2: In the taskbar towards the left, navigate to the Acquisition tab and then further select All Traffic » Channels.

You will be able to see a detailed report of all the channels. Channels from which you are receiving traffic like Organic, direct, paid, social, referral and others. Beside each column is the number of users, traffic, new sessions, bounce rate through each medium. This will help you understand which of the channel is helping you in your business. You can also understand that which one requires special attention.

Step 3: Choose the social tab and you will get a report of all the social media platforms. From the list you can choose whichever platform you want to analyze.  In this report, there are different data mentioned across each social media channel like Acquisition, Behaviour and many more. This data will help you formulate the social media strategy for your brand.

As per the default settings of Google Analytics, the entire traffic report of your social media is displayed is the raw data from in a tabular view. To better understand the data and analyse it with ease, one can easily change the view of the report as per their requirements.

The Data Can Be View in the Below-given Forms:

  1. Percentage form: A pie chart is a better view to understanding the data. The percentage form helps you convert your data in pie chart form.
  2. Performance: To compare a certain data , the performance helps you display the relative performance of the selected metric in the horizontal bar chart format.
  3. Comparison: One can compare a particular metric to the site average through the comparison bar chart.
  4. Term Cloud: The term cloud provides you a visual representation of the keywords of your website. If you want to interpret the keyword data this is the best option.
  5. Pivot: It helps you see the data trends which may be difficult to otherwise determine. You can also rearrange the information of the table by pivoting a certain data on the second dimension.

The Data Can Be View in the Below-given Forms

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Thus, one can better understand the data through the various viewing options that are available on Google Analytics.

Analyze Social Media Data

Some basic points which will help you analyse the data are:

  1. The acquisition and Behaviour together helps you understand the quality of traffic.
  2. A higher session platform is performing better than the others.
  3. If the % new users are more that means that the old users are not returning and the website is entertaining more of the new users.
  4. A lower bounce rate means that the audience from that source are more engaged with the content.
  5. A higher Pages/session shows that people are seeing more pages through that platform.
  6. A higher average page duration means that the traffic through that source is staying longer on the website. Thus engaging more.

Conclusion

If you have just started with social media marketing, these are great ways that will help you track and improve your social media strategy. If you are confused about what to use A/B testing can be used to be sure of your plan. This will require you to try different plans and then track the results of both.

Another great thing about Google Analytics is the freedom to set your goals. Google Analytics has an option where you can set goals and objectives for your social media strategy. Check if you have achieved them or not. Make sure that the goals you set are in line with the company goals. And also make sure that huge improvement in traffic can be seen.

Through the report published by Google Analytics, you can identify which social media drives the maximum, targeted traffic to your website. Further, you can also see how users interact with your website. So read, analyze and make smart decisions for your social media with Google Analytics.

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