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How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Social Media Marketing

December 5, 2012 / Brian Reilly / No comments

Have you ever wanted to know which of your links are driving more traffic?

Seeing referral traffic from Facebook is great, but which wall post drove the traffic?

Do visitors who come from Twitter tend to spend more time on the site than visitors coming from a banner campaign?

This article shows you how to take your social analytics strategy to the next level.

About Google Analytics Custom Campaigns

You can assign a custom campaign tag to the links you share on social networking sites. This enables you to fully use Google Analytics to gain valuable insights into how well your various social networking site presences are working for you.

Google Analytics makes custom campaigns incredibly easy to work with. By using their Custom URL Builder, you can create specific links for each of your campaigns and use these to share online.

Google Analytics can then give you much more information based on how people use your custom links. And you can use this information to gain a better understanding of your referral traffic and adjust your social media marketing for optimum results.

Google Analytics not only lets you measure sales and conversions, but also gives you fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site and how you can keep them coming back.

Before you dive in and attempt to create your first custom campaign link with Google Analytics’ Custom Campaign Parameters, it’s important to learn about the various ways you’ll need to categorize your links.

Google Analytics Custom Campaign Parameters

There are five parameters that can be added to a URL:

You need to set parameters for your custom campaign.

Before providing step-by-step instructions below for assigning Google Analytics Custom Campaign Parameters to create the URL link you’ll want to use, here’s a look at how one company harnessed the power of custom campaigns.

NUK-USA Measures the Effectiveness of Social With Google Analytics Custom Campaigns

NUK-USA, a popular brand of pacifiers and sippy-cups in North America, is leveraging the power of Google Analytics. NUK-USA currently amends their URLs with campaign tags to measure the effectiveness of the various media they use: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, email blasts, etc.

Many of the links used by NUK-USA leverage Google Analytics Custom Campaigns, which allow them to see which digital media are working hardest for them.

Below is a Facebook post that brought in 49 likes and 51 comments. How many users clicked through? How many pages on average were viewed once there, how much time did users spend on the website once there and how many new visits were produced?

All of these questions and more are answered when links are tagged correctly.

49 likes and 51 comments is impressive. Having tagged their wall post link correctly for Google Analytics Custom Campaigns, NUK-USA was able to see that 64 Facebook fans clicked through the link within the post onto the website.

Let’s analyze the link they used

Before we analyze anything, let’s note that NUK-USA uses bitly, a popular link shortening service, to shorten the links they use online.

When URLs are amended with custom campaign parameters, they become lengthy. To avoid the clutter, many marketers will take their long links and run them through a URL shortening service to make them more consumer-friendly.

Once the bitly link is clicked within the wall post, the link is presented in the browser and it’s definitely long. Here it is.

http://www.nuk-usa.com/all-products/pacifiers.aspx?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Facebook_Post&utm_campaign =Facebook_Post_Pacifiers_9.27

Let’s dissect the different portions of this link:

utm_source: Facebook
utm_medium: Facebook_Post
utm:_campaign: Facebook_Post_Pacifiers_9.27

Let’s break this link down to understand it further:

The utm_source value is ‘Facebook’. The traffic coming from this link originates on Facebook.
The utm_medium value is ‘Facebook_Post’. The traffic coming to this link originated on Facebook and was shared within a Facebook wall post.
The utm_campaign value is ‘Facebook_Post_Pacifiers_9.27′, which helps to further categorize the referral traffic. If there are multiple posts implemented in one day, providing a utm_campaign value helps to roll up all post data into one campaign value.

It’s not just about likes, comments and shares

By implementing custom tagging within Google Analytics, NUK-USA is able to see several data points that they wouldn’t have otherwise, unless they spent the extra time tagging the URL. Here’s what their Google Analytics showed them:

64 users clicked from the Facebook post onto the website. Compared to the 49 likes and 51 comments, the click-through on this post is incredibly high.
4.09 pages were viewed on average per visit. The content on the site is sticky and successfully brings users to other parts of the website.
The user spends, on average, 00:01:57 on the site, navigating through the 4.09 pages.
75% of the users clicking through the Facebook wall post are new visitors. Bringing new visitors to a website is always a plus!

Here’s how to interpret this information

It’s important to look beyond the vanity metrics that the social networks provide—likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc.—and see how effective these media are for driving traffic to your site.

Is the traffic coming to your site valuable? Which times of the day and days of the week bring the most quality traffic to your site? Are you spending a lot of time on Facebook and not seeing the click-throughs you want to see? Maybe using Twitter or Pinterest is a better way to entice your target audience.

Seven Steps to Getting Started With Google Analytics Custom Campaigns

Are you interested in setting up your custom campaign? Here’s what you need to do.

Visit the Google Analytics Custom URL Builder.
In the Website URL field, enter the destination page you plan to send users to.
Enter the URL of the website for which you plan to generate a link. Be sure to write out the full version, starting with "http".

Fill in the Campaign Source to identify the origin of the visit (Facebook, Twitter, email blast, etc.).
Enter the location where you plan to use the URL. Is it with a search engine? Is it on Facebook? Email marketing platform?

Fill in the Campaign Medium to identify the vehicle for link delivery (wall post, tweet, etc.).
Enter the location where the URL will be placed. Will it be within a wall post, tweet, paid search listing or banner ad? This is where you will fill out that information.

Fill in the Campaign Name to identify the campaign that the link is associated with. There can be many links rolled up under one campaign.
Enter the name of the campaign or promotion that this link supports. Is it supporting a new product launch, a holiday sale or is it intended to simply drive traffic from a source and medium? Be sure to list that out here—this field is mandatory!

Click the Generate URL button to assemble the URL based on all of the campaign parameters specified.
Once Generate URL is clicked, all parameters are compiled into one URL. Before using this URL, be sure to log the URL into a spreadsheet so you can keep track of all URLs that have been generated. You may need to use this URL again, or you may want to reference how you decided to name your various campaigns, sources and media. Putting in extra effort to keep your links organized will go a long way!

Log the URL in a spreadsheet. It’s very important to keep track of the campaigns and be able to see how the various parameters are named.

After you create your custom campaign link with the Google Analytics URL Builder as outlined in these 7 steps, you are ready to use this custom URL when sharing links for your campaigns.

Six Steps for Analyzing Campaign Effectiveness

When you are ready to see how your campaign is doing, follow these steps for the valuable data you can now get from Google Analytics.

Log into Google Analytics.
Click on Traffic Sources.
Click on Traffic Sources > Sources.
Click on Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns.
Drilling down into the Campaigns report will allow you to see how well all campaigns are working for you. A campaign listing here can represent one URL or many URLs. This depends on how the URL parameters were assigned.

Locate the campaign you wish to analyze and click on it to drill deeper.
Review Visits, Pages/Visit, Avg. Time Spent on Site, %New vs. %Returning and Bounce Rate to make informed decisions about each social network driving people to your website.

Helpful Hints

Are you doing this for the first time? Have you done this before and want to hone your skills? You don’t have to learn the hard way! Here are some useful tips to follow.

It’s important to keep and maintain an organized spreadsheet with all custom campaign URLs.
If you’re tracking Facebook wall posts, it’s important to pick whether you will designate the Campaign Source as, for example, ‘Facebook’, ‘facebook’, ‘FB’ or ‘fb’, to maintain consistency.
When assigning parameters, it’s important to use an underscore to separate multiple words in a string. Instead of inputting ‘wall post’, you’d want to enter ‘wall_post’. If a space is entered, the URL Builder will enter in ‘%2b’, which is its text translation of a space.
When creating social media reports that summarize the value of Facebook wall posts, tweets, etc., it’s important to merge those metrics with the Google Analytics metrics (see the NUK-USA example above) for a more holistic and informed analysis of how the various social media platforms are working.

Have fun with it!

There’s never been a better time to immerse yourself into the world of web analytics. Start small, amend a few URLs and track the results closely, then develop a custom plan for how to use them moving forward!

What do you think? Have you worked with Google Analytics to create custom campaigns? Do you plan on giving it a try? Drop a comment below if you’d like me to provide feedback on your custom campaign tagging!

Category: bitly, brian reilly, campaign source, custom campaign, custom tagging, custom url builder, google analytics, How To, social analytics strategy, social media analytics, Tracking, traffic source /

4 Social Media Goals Every Business Should Measure

September 17, 2012 / Andrew K Kirk / No comments

Are you winging it when it comes to your social activity?

The expression “social media ROI” gets tossed around frequently and you know it’s important.

But where do you start and how do you relate what to measure online with your overall business goals?

Here are four business goals, how social media can impact these goals and most importantly, how you can measure the impact of your social media efforts on these goals.

Determine how each goal below relates to your specific business goals and then choose which social media results are relevant to measure.

Goal #1: Raise Awareness of Your Brand

Do you want to increase your brand recognition and online influence?

It’s important to stay relevant. If customers aren’t aware of your brand and what it stands for, your business may be spinning its wheels.

When customers are aware of your brand and interact with it on different social media sites, they are more likely to recommend it to their friends by liking posts on Facebook and retweeting you on Twitter.

Brand awareness is a crucial first step in gaining a customer. Image source: iStockPhoto.

Here’s how to measure your brand recognition and influence online.

Klout looks at your various profiles from across the web to assess your influence. Your Klout score is a reflection of your brand’s social influence based on your activity across many social networks and ranges between 10 (low) to 100 (Bieber).

Klout is a popular tool for measuring your online influence.

Digging deeper into your score, Klout can provide further analysis, including:

True Reach: How many people you influence (the width of your influence)
Amplification: How much you influence people (the depth of your influence)
Network Impact: How influential your audience is (the impact of your influencers)

Track your Klout scores over time to assess your progress.

To measure the effectiveness of your PR and branding efforts, record your Klout Score, True Reach, Amplification and Network Impact on a spreadsheet each month. Then, over time, your changes in scores will allow you to understand which efforts improve your score.

In my case, guest blogging and increasing my average daily tweet count from two to five has had the greatest positive impact on my influence score.

NOTE: It’s important to remember that Klout is simply evaluating your external social media presence. It is not a direct measurement of your revenue or success as a business. It’s an important distinction because people can get easily swept away in trying to increase these social media numbers.

Goal #2: Website Traffic

Have you wanted to drive more traffic to your site or blog?

Traffic is important to all sites, especially if you’re selling online.

While website traffic should never be the end-all, be-all goal of your website, in order to accomplish other website goals, you must have a baseline level of traffic.

If you create the most beautiful, efficient website you can, it won’t matter without traffic.

Don’t get me wrong, there many other factors that can influence conversions, but website traffic is the fuel required to even begin the race.

Besides sales opportunities, the more people you have visiting your site, the more chances people have to engage with your blog content, click your social media widgets, interact with your brand or share your site with friends and followers using your sharing buttons.

Bottom line, the more traffic to your site, the more chances you have to make money. Image source: iStockPhoto.

Here’s how to measure visits from social media traffic.

Google Analytics makes this process very simple for any website owner.

To understand traffic, use Google Analytics Social Reports, which show site data generated directly from over 400 social sites.

Open your Google Analytics account.
Select the Traffic Sources tab.
From the Social drop down menu, select the Overview page.
Record Visits and Visits via Social Referral into your spreadsheet.

Your Visits via Social Referral number shows the specific impact of social media on your site traffic and you can quickly see its percentage of your overall traffic by dividing by Visits.

Goal #3: Website Visitor Loyalty

Do you want to increase the amount of time spent on your site or blog?

The more time people spend on your page, the more likely they are to buy from you.

If the people visiting your page only do it once, then you’re not executing a long-term web strategy. Ideally, you want to create loyal visitors who frequent your site.

Another very important aspect of visitor loyalty is to understand on average how many visits are required for one of your visitors to convert.

A conversion could be a visitor purchasing from your site, signing up for an email newsletter or downloading an ebook.

Establishing loyalty to your site will help grow your customer base. Image source: iStockPhoto.

Here’s how to measure visitor loyalty from social media.

This measurement requires a one-time setup step (Part A), but once completed it can be easily reused for future measuring (Part B).

You’ll need to create a custom segment inside Google Analytics specific to your social media traffic.

Visitor loyalty numbers will depend greatly on your site type, your readers and the content you produce. Therefore, it’s important to look at your baseline levels, set a goal and measure your trend over time.

Part A—Setup

Open Google Analytics, and click into your Admin panel.
Click the Advanced Segments link. Click Create + New Segment.
Create a new Advanced Segment in Google Analytics.

Name this new segment “Social Media Sources.”
Click the green drop down menu and select the green Source. Inside the text input box, enter the URL of one social media site, such as “Facebook.com.”
Select Source and add a URL for a social media site.

Click the Add OR Statement, then click Add a Dimension, and again select Source to add another site. Repeat Step #4 to add another social media referring source such as Twitter.
Continue to add sources for each social network referring traffic to your site.

Repeat Step #5 to add all major social media sources, such as Facebook, Twitter, t.co, YouTube, StumbleUpon and Digg. Once these have been added to your Custom Segment, click the Save Segment button.

Part B—Measuring Loyalty

From Google Analytics Standard Reporting, select the Audience tab.
From the Behavior drop down menu, select the Frequency & Recency page.
Click the Advanced Segments tab, check your custom Social Media Sources, and hit the Apply button.
Select your Social Media Sources segment.

Add the percentage of total Visits (top percent number) for the first three Count of Visits rows (3 visits or fewer) and subtract this percentage from 100% to calculate your Regulars value. Record your Regulars percentage on your spreadsheet. My goal is to increase my Regulars percentage over time.
Use Visit Count to calculate regular visitors from social media sources to understand the loyalty of these visitors.

Goal #4: Conversion Rates

Do you want to increase total conversions from social media?

Most business owners want to understand the direct relationship between social activities and sales.

You should know the traffic source for any important business goal and these goals should be set up in Google Analytics or your software of choice.

For most of you, the most important web goal is a visitor converting to a lead captured by entering personal information into one of your web forms. For businesses that conduct the majority of business online, these goals are the lifeblood of the organization and are key measures of success.

Even if you’re just getting started acquiring customers or leads online, you should make this measurement a primary focus of your efforts.

According to Gartner Research, by 2015 companies will generate 50% of web sales via their social presence and mobile applications. Image source: iStockPhoto.

Here’s how to measure conversions from social media.

Using the Social Reports within Google Analytics, we can understand the specific value of each social network. Of course, you need to have goals set up within Google Analytics for the conversion information to be displayed.

Do the following:

Open your Google Analytics account.
Select the Traffic Sources tab.
From the Social drop down menu, select the Conversions page.
Google Analytics displays conversions from social traffic sources.

Record Conversions and Conversion Value into your spreadsheet. Consider recording this value more often than monthly.
Google Analytics shows Total Conversions and Conversion Value.

Conclusion

I recommend you measure your goals on a monthly basis, record these numbers in a Google spreadsheet and monitor the increases or decreases month-to-month. As a bonus, the measurements outlined here can all be done with free software.

Don’t fool yourself into believing that social media is completely free marketing. Your time is valuable, especially if you’re just starting up or you’re a small business. Unfocused efforts spent on social media can quickly become a huge time sink.

By measuring your social media impact, you ensure the best use of your time and resources.

What do you think? What social media metrics are you measuring? What questions do you have about measuring goals? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Images from iStockPhoto.

Category: andrew kirk, brand awareness, conversion rate, google analytics, How To, Return On Investment, social media analytics, social media goals, social media impact, social media metric, social report, Traffic /

The Most Important Facebook Metric You Choose to Ignore

July 19, 2012 / Matt Winn / No comments

If you’re truly looking to measure your Facebook footprint, it’s time to stop ignoring and start prioritizing Facebook reach, which is defined as “the number of unique people who have seen your post.”

Category: Engagement, facebook, facebook insights, facebook reach, Metrics, Social Media, social media analytics, social media engagement, social media metrics, Yes /

From Social Media Metrics Dummy to Genius: 5 Tips from Leslie Poston

July 5, 2012 / mlewis1 / No comments

Leslie Poston would be the first to tell you that marketers these days can easily drown in social media data. So don’t start with piling up data that won’t help you make your social marketing programs better.

Category: Analytics, edgerank checker, Klout, Leslie Poston, Peer Index, PinReach, Regular Expression Checker, ripples, SEO for Chrome, Social Business, social media analytics, social media metrics, W3Patrol /

5 Killer Strategies to Dominate Facebook, Twitter and YouTube [Infographic]

July 2, 2012 / mlewis1 / No comments

Awareness, Inc. examined each platform and shared five strategies marketers can apply to guarantee success for increasing brand awareness, fostering brand advocacy and generating leads and sales.

Category: @bostonmike, #awarenesstips, Awareness, Inc., facebook, influencer strategies, lead generation, Social Media, social media analytics, social media engagement, Social media’s Big 3, Social Reach, twitter, youtube /

Sentiment Analysis Symposium call for speakers, plus free videos from New York

June 27, 2012 / SethGrimes / No comments

The Call for Speakers is open for the next Sentiment Analysis Symposium (http://sentimentsymposium.com), slated for October 30, 2012 in San Francisco.

Category: Analytics, Enterprise Social, Events, listening, Monitoring Tools, Opinion, reputation management, Research, sentiment analysis, Social Business, Social Media, social media analytics /

Nathan Gilliatt on the Latest in Social Media Analytics

May 29, 2012 / mlewis1 / No comments

Nathan Gilliatt, social media analytics expert and principal at Social Target discusses how social media analytics can enhance customer service, improve brand reputation management and measure overall social media success for businesses.

Category: Analytics, AnalyticsCamp, marketing analytics, Nathan Gillaitt, Social Business, social media analytics, Social Media Analytics Summit, social media content, Social Target, web analytics, Yes /

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