Using Google Analytics Social Media reports can help you with your social media marketing in a number of ways. Social referrals are a huge element for most social media sites and having information on where these social referrals come from can allow you to get a better picture of how people found your site and where they went after visiting.
Getting social media reports or traffic sources in Google Analytics is a simple workaround. Although this doesn’t provide much insights, it does provide you with a list of social media sites driving expected traffic to your website. We can use the top social media site from that report and create a Google Analytics Goals Report.
How to View Social Media Traffic in Google Analytics
Follow the below steps to view the social media report of your site in Google Analytics.
Log in to Google Analytics and select the right website for which you’d like to view the social media report.
In the left taskbar, navigate to Acquisition » All Traffic » Channels. You can view a detailed Channels report. Now click on the Social column.
This will show you the social media traffic report of your site.
How to Interpret Your Social Media Traffic Data
By default, Google Analytics report displays the raw data of your social media traffic in a tabular view. To interpret the data with ease, you might want to change the view of the report. Besides the tabular view, Google Analytics supports the following views as well.
- Percentage: It displays a pie chart that shows the contribution to the total for the selected metric.
- Performance: With a horizontal bar chart, it displays the relative performance of the selected metric.
- Comparison: With a bar chart, it shows the performance of the selected metric to the site average.
- Term cloud: It displays a visual representation of keywords of your site. This view is the best option for interpreting the keyword data of your site.
- Pivot: It allows you to detect data trends that you can’t determine otherwise. You can rearrange the information in the table by pivoting the data on a second dimension.
For example, let’s say that you run an eCommerce site and want to track which social media site contributes to the most direct sales and revenue. You can get the data in many different ways.
For easier analysis, let’s choose the percentage view in your social media channels report.
In the social media channel report page, click on the Percentage view. Then, choose Transactions as your primary metric. In the contribution to total field, choose Revenue.
Now you can see a customized report sorted by the number of transactions. You can also see a pie chart that shows the contribution of each social networking site to the total social commerce revenue.
Similarly, you can also use other views to get a customized report that helps you easily interpret social media traffic data.
See how much social media contributes to your overall visits
Where to find this report:
Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels
What this report tells you:
You can see your traffic sources at a high-level:
- Organic search (people clicking through from Google)
- Social (Twitter, Facebook, social visits)
- Direct (people typing your site in their browser or bookmarks)
- Referral (people clicking links from other sites to get to you)
- Paid search
- Other
With this info, you get a great sense of the importance of social media for bringing people to your site. If you ever need justification for focusing on social media, this report is it!
For the Buffer blog, we see 15 percent of our traffic from social, which accounts for nearly 150,000 visits each month.
Advanced:
Under the Acquisition > All Traffic category, you can click to view the Source/Medium, which will show you a granular break down of the search, social, and referral traffic. For a quick hack into your mobile vs. desktop traffic, look at how each social network URL is abbreviated. Twitter on mobile is represented by t.co, and desktop is twitter.com. Facebook on mobile is represented by m.facebook.com, and desktop is facebook.com.
In addition, to see the mobile vs. desktop traffic breakdown, you can add a Secondary Dimension to any view (by clicking the Secondary Dimension button at the top of any table). Type in “Mobile” and select “Mobile (Including Tablet).
Multi-channel reports
Where to find this report:
Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Overview
This report will work if you’ve got Goals set up for your website. (See below.)
What this report tells you:
The Venn diagram you’ll get on this report page shows the various paths that people take to convert through your website or blog. For example, on the Buffer blog, a good majority of people convert after coming to the site from organic search. A smaller—but still significant—portion convert after coming directly or clicking on a link from social media.
The overlap in the Venn diagrams represent visitors who might, for instance, click a link in a tweet first, then come back to the site directly later on to go through the conversion flow. And Google Analytics tracks all this, all the way through!
Advanced:
Further down into the Multi-Channel Funnels, there are some neat reports:
- Top Conversion Paths
- Time Lag
- Page Length
For Top Conversion Paths, you can see the frequency with which visitors take certain routes to conversion. For instance, I can see in my report that the most common path is a person visiting my site directly two times before converting. The top social path is a visit or two from social first, then a direct visit.
You can change the view here also by clicking on “Source/Medium Path” at the top of the chart to see the specific social networks involved in the conversion flow.
For Time Lag, you can see how many days come between first visit and conversion.
For Path Length, you can see a breakdown of how many paths are involved in each conversion typically. For my blog, the vast majority (75%) convert after one visit.
Find the page in the Landing Pages report
Go to the Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages report and find the URL, either by scrolling through the list or with a quick filter. You can see the filter I used to find an article in our Analytics, highlighted in this report.
Step 2. Click the URL to drill down into the report
Once you find it, click it. Now you’re looking at a one-row report with just that one URL. That’s good.
Step 3. Add a “Secondary dimension”
Open the dropdown menu above the first column. This lets you add data from a different report into this report in a second column. Search for “source” in the little search box in the drop down, and click “Source / Medium”
Now you’re looking at all traffic sources and mediums for this URL, including email, organic, direct. Next we want to remove all but the social sources.
But notice how some of the “social” sources have “referrer” as the medium and look like referral traffic. Some networks seem to appear twice, with different mediums. There’s no consistency. This is because social traffic is inherently difficult to attribute. It comes from apps and websites, URL shorteners and redirects. Analytics is doing its best!
A filter will clean it up.
Step 4. Use an (advanced) filter to see just social traffic
Click “Advanced” next to the filter box. Set the filter to just show the rows where the “Source / Medium” are social networks. It will look something like this:
We need to use “Matches RegExp” (as in, “matches regular expression”) instead of “Containing” so we can list a bunch of options: LinkedIn OR Facebook OR Twitter…
To filter for “A or B” in analytics, you need to use the vertical line “|” character, known as the pipe. It’s the regular expression for “or” and it’s very useful. So to specify “A or B or C” you use “A|B|C”
Shortcut! Copy and paste the following regular expression string into that last little box. It should catch everything:
social|face|twitter|^t.co|linked|pinterest|youtube|quora|reddit|imgur|tumblr|stumbleupon|flickr|bit.ly|tinyurl
Done! Now you can see just how much traffic came from every social source to this specific URL.
It was kind of a hassle to make this report. Don’t lose it! If you’d like to reference it quickly later, click the Save button at the top and then find it later in Customizations > Saved Reports. Or add it to a Google Analytics dashboard.
Don’t be surprised if…
- You need to keep adjusting your filter to catch everything.
- The trendline is very spiky. Social is an unpredictable channel, right?
To See Just Social Media Traffic in Analytics
Step 1. Click the + Add Segment button
It’s at the top above the trendline in every report.
Step 2. Click the red + New Segment button
We need to create one of our own because there is no pre-built (system) segment for social media traffic!
Step 3. Click “Conditions”
It’s in the left side menu, under “Advanced.” Also, this is a good time to name your segment. Maybe something fun and creative like “Social media visits.”
Step 4. Set the conditions for your new segment
Conditional segments are built the same way we built the advanced filter a minute ago, with one difference: they can apply to sessions (visits) or users (visitors). Probably, it makes no difference which you select. You’ll get very similar insights either way.
Your segment is for visits where the Source / Medium contains any of your social networks. Put this long RegEx string into the open field:
social|face|twitter|^t.co|linked|pinterest|youtube|quora|reddit|imgur|tumblr|stumbleupon|flickr|bit.ly|tinyurl|ow.ly|myspace
It should look like this.
Notice how Analytics shows you the percentage of users on the right (3.5% in this example). It’s fun that GA is giving you insights even before you save the segment!
Step 5: Save and browse around some reports!
It’s interesting, especially if you leave the “All Users” segment turned on. This lets you compare social visitors to all visitors.
Check out the conversion reports. Or the Behavior > Overview report. Or the Audience > Mobile > Overview report.
Don’t be surprised if…
- Acquisition reports are all meaningless. Your segment zeroes out all but the social traffic!
- Google Search Console reports don’t work at all. They’re all pre-click data from organic search, irrelevant to social media. Besides, GSC doesn’t obey segments.
Conclusion
Social media is an essential aspect in the modern business world. It’s a great way for businesses to connect with existing and potential customers, and also learn how they use their services. It’s also an excellent resource for social media marketers – particularly if you’re looking to analyze the performance of your content. Google Analytics gives you tons of ways to gain valuable insight about your social media strategy, and this article will take you through the most useful ones.