Every social media manager is always searching for a way to see which network their audience is on, and how to measure the most effective usage of their time. Monitoring social media traffic has been made exponentially easier by Google Analytics’ Social Reporting feature.
They provide an easy to use dashboard that gives you information on your social network’s effectiveness and what content they like the best! It also allows you to figure out which networks to focus on and why. Here is everything you need to know about using Google Analytics’ Social Media Reporting.
Social media traffic
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).”
Social reports in Google Analytics
Google Analytics (Universal Analytics an unfortunately not GA4 or Google Analytics 4) includes a dedicated set of reports covering the social media platforms sending us traffic. I like these reports because they clean things up for us and they make it easier to understand the performance of the different social networks.
Here’s the Social Overview report:
The Overview report gives you a top level summary of the performance of your social network traffic. Now, if you’re getting started, I actually think this report is a little confusing because it actually includes social traffic as well as non-social traffic.
Here I’ve highlighted the data which is for your entire website (which includes traffic from social networks and non-social traffic too). The idea is that you can quickly compare the performance of social networks to metrics for all of your traffic sources.
Traffic by social channel
See your most valuable networks, plus the up-and-comers
Where to find this report:
Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals
What this report tells you:
At-a-glance, you can see which social network sends you the most visits to your website. For instance, Twitter sent the Buffer blog 79,096 visitors last month.
You can view the data in a pie chart to see how the networks break down as an overall percentage of social traffic to your site. For instance, Twitter accounted for 56 percent of social traffic to the Buffer blog. Twitter and Facebook combined accounted for 81 percent.
You can expand the results to show 25 or 50 channels, then change the date range to include a comparison to last period. Voila! Now you can identify networks beyond your main ones that are beginning to send you more and more traffic. For the Buffer blog, we’ve noticed StumbleUpon and Hacker News seem to be on the rise.
Advanced:
If you click on the individual network name in this report, you can see a breakdown of all the links of yours that have been shared on that network.
Social reports
Now, after separating and organizing everything, comes the time to obtain specific information on the social aspects. These reports are going to help you show your boss that you are generating as many communications activities as the sales team 😉 In the Acquisition > Social section we can find eight sub-sections that will give us all the information we need on social metrics.
Overview: This shows the different conversions and features a table of total sessions from different social networks. For it to be effective it is necessary to set goals before hand. In fact, if you don’t set them you will not get any information.
It also allows you to see, at a glance, the value of the conversion generated through social media compared to all other conversions. “Last Interaction Social Conversions” are those interactions that lead to a conversion directly form a social referral.
“Contributed Social Conversions” are those in which users interact from a social referral and do not generate a conversion at the time, but later come back and make a conversion. A bit like the difference between a goal and an assist in football. In addition to this, it gives you a list of social networks by session.
This tab is very useful to see, at a glance, how social is contributing to conversions, which networks are bringing more traffic, as well as seeing which networks we are not interacting with. It’s possible you’ll see that you are investing a lot of effort in a network that doesn’t bring the traffic it should and another that you’re not really paying attention to is bringing you more traffic than expected.
Although communications professionals are not only concerned with traffic… as we explain in the following point.
Network referrals: This tab compares sessions with referred social traffic and total traffic. It also compares sessions by network, number of page views, average duration and pages/session.
It’s useful to see the quality of social network traffic. It’s important to take into account traffic quality and not just volume. Imagine, for example, that Twitter is bringing you lots of traffic, but with a very high bounce rate and a low average duration and that Facebook brings you less traffic, but with better metrics. The quality of Facebook traffic in this case would be better.
Data Hub Activity: this section and the following one are very new and still need improvement, but the idea is very good and it will make a valuable contribution to the information we have available. This report shows people’s interaction with your website from social media, showing you which URLs are being shared, comments made, where and how they are shared… this list can also be filtered by social network.
This enables you to have all your interactions from the different social networks in one window: comments, likes, +1, etc. You can manage all your social networks and use qualitative data for each action in each network without needing other tools, compiling one sole report. It’ll be wonderful… BUT right now you can only get information from the networks associated with Google. The following:
This evidently will not be truly useful until such time as at least Facebook and Twitter join Google. Until then we can view this as a preview of things to come.
Landing pages: this shows the metrics based on landing page URLs. It shows sessions, number of page views, average session duration and pages per session.
It also enables you to identify the most viral content by clicking on the “Data Hub Activity”. The results will be shown on a table listing URLs in order of virality. By clicking on any of them you’ll be able see the social network where the URL comes from. This is very useful for knowing how the landing pages are working, comparing them and understanding how each social network works for a particular landing page.
It’s extremely useful to be able to see the impact of your content on your website and elsewhere and be able to filter by social network. However, to be able to know what actions have been taken on each social network and seeing it all one a single report would be great. Google knows this, but once again, this will be truly useful when Google has more associates, and particularly the important social networks.
Trackback: this is a very interesting metric, it shows websites that link to yours, the landing pages they link to and how much traffic is generated by this specific link to your website. This makes opportunities for collaboration and link building easy 😉
* I don’t really see the difference between this parameter and referral traffic. Referral traffic also displays those websites linking to yours.
This section offers two types of information with something in common, both the linked pages and those they link to are blog posts. But even taking that into account, I have found links in “referral traffic” and not here.
I promise I’ll look into this… But if you have anything to add don’t hesitate to contact me!
Conversions: this is the most useful report for assessing ROI. It displays the number of conversions for each social network and the total number of conversions (the goal has to be entered manually). It also compares assisted and direct conversions. It is very useful for knowing the results of the conversions for each network.
Plugins: if you have social media buttons (and we’ve already agreed you do) this report enables us to know which pages are being shared the most and from which social networks our pages are being shared from. This can be useful to create more content related or similar to the most popular content and vice versa. You can even test where the buttons should go on your website, comparing results, switching them about, etc…
Users Flow: this serves to analyse browsing paths users that reach your website from social media take. Clicking on each network displays the browsing path users reaching your website from here have taken. By examining the path in depth you can see which pages are dead-ends and change them to ensure greater interactivity with the rest of the page. As you know, the longer they spend on your website, the greater the possibilities of them making a conversion, or simply remembering your brand.
UTM labels
Imagine you have an event coming up and that you want to promote it on social media. It would be interesting to measure the performance of the campaign for each social network. Wouldn’t it? Well, voilà, here’s where UTM labels come in! They enable us to separate the campaigns that we launch and, in the case of social media, to distinguish social traffic generated by our activities from posts of other users on social media.
These labels are simply added to the URL of the pages you are sharing. All those clicking on them will be registered under the parameters specified for the URL.
There are several ways of adding UTM labels but the main ones are:
- The simplest option is using Google’s URL Creator (you can check this great explanatory guide by Prateek Agarwal)
- Content (optional): this field is used to differentiate two different actions within one campaign. We can also add them manually: with this example URL (www.example.com/landing1/)
To add the UTM labels, all you have to do is add a “?” and then add parameters joined with a “&”. Here’s how it looks with our example URL:
www.example.com/landing1/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=promo_evento Here we can see the different parameters available to us:- Source (obligatory): the website where the traffic comes from. For social networks the name of the social network should be added.
- Medium (obligatory): the medium where the traffic comes from. In this case it’s Facebook. If, for example, we were talking about an Adwords campaign we’d enter “Google” as the medium. We don’t recommend changing the names of mediums because it entails the risk of dividing the data and muddying the information we receive.
- Campaign (obligatory): the name we want to give the activity. In this case we’ve called it promo_evento and that’s how it will appear in Analytics.
- Term (optional): this stores the term or keyword which appears to users in our ad. Analytics enters this word automatically for organic searches. When using PPC this word needs to be entered manually.
I don’t want to bang on, but our guide also includes a Google doc by Lunametrics that as well as enabling very simple label management, shows you how to shorten them using a Bit.ly account.
Events
Google Analytics monitors many user activities by default, but there are others you may be interested in measuring. By creating events you can measure any action that users carry out by clicking, that’s to say interactive actions. We can measure clicks on links, social media icons, downloads, playing videos ect.
To install them go to http://gaconfig.com/google-analytics-event-tracking/
Enter the parameters you are asked for and you will be given a code. This code can be entered in your website’s html code. We recommend to avoid having to ask the IT department is to do so using Google Tag Manager, that is simple to use.
In any case, to install specific events for social media I recommend you go to: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingSocial
UTM labels
Imagine you have an event coming up and that you want to promote it on social media. It would be interesting to measure the performance of the campaign for each social network. Wouldn’t it? Well, voilà, here’s where UTM labels come in! They enable us to separate the campaigns that we launch and, in the case of social media, to distinguish social traffic generated by our activities from posts of other users on social media.
These labels are simply added to the URL of the pages you are sharing. All those clicking on them will be registered under the parameters specified for the URL.
There are several ways of adding UTM labels but the main ones are:
- The simplest option is using Google’s URL Creator (you can check this great explanatory guide by Prateek Agarwal)
- Content (optional): this field is used to differentiate two different actions within one campaign. We can also add them manually: with this example URL (www.example.com/landing1/)
To add the UTM labels, all you have to do is add a “?” and then add parameters joined with a “&”. Here’s how it looks with our example URL:
www.example.com/landing1/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=promo_evento Here we can see the different parameters available to us:- Source (obligatory): the website where the traffic comes from. For social networks the name of the social network should be added.
- Medium (obligatory): the medium where the traffic comes from. In this case it’s Facebook. If, for example, we were talking about an Adwords campaign we’d enter “Google” as the medium. We don’t recommend changing the names of mediums because it entails the risk of dividing the data and muddying the information we receive.
- Campaign (obligatory): the name we want to give the activity. In this case we’ve called it promo_evento and that’s how it will appear in Analytics.
- Term (optional): this stores the term or keyword which appears to users in our ad. Analytics enters this word automatically for organic searches. When using PPC this word needs to be entered manually.
I don’t want to bang on, but our guide also includes a Google doc by Lunametrics that as well as enabling very simple label management, shows you how to shorten them using a Bit.ly account.
Events
Google Analytics monitors many user activities by default, but there are others you may be interested in measuring. By creating events you can measure any action that users carry out by clicking, that’s to say interactive actions. We can measure clicks on links, social media icons, downloads, playing videos ect.
To install them go to http://gaconfig.com/google-analytics-event-tracking/
Enter the parameters you are asked for and you will be given a code. This code can be entered in your website’s html code. We recommend to avoid having to ask the IT department is to do so using Google Tag Manager, that is simple to use.
In any case, to install specific events for social media I recommend you go to: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingSocial
Tracking paid social media campaigns
Now that we’ve looked at the default or automatic reporting, let’s move on to paid social media advertising.
If you’re going to spend on paid ads, you need to be sure you’re tracking and measuring them correctly. This is accomplished through the use of campaign tags, which enable you to track your customized marketing campaigns, which include social media and any other inbound marketing.
All the links in your paid ads on social media need to be customized so they include suitable campaign tags. Campaign tags include the following:
- Campaign name allows you to define the whole marketing campaign. For example, for Facebook advertising, you might simply call the campaign Facebook Ads, or for a time-sensitive campaign, you could call it Spring Promotion or something similar. It’s worth noting that how you name your campaign is entirely up to you, so go with what you want to see in your reports. If you’re undecided, my advice is to go with something logical and easy to interpret.
- Campaign source and medium are just like the default source and medium we covered earlier in the post. Remember that source is where the message is seen and medium is how the message is communicated.
- Campaign content is optional, however it can be useful to identify clicks from different ads if you have multiple ads running on a social network. For example, if you have an ad with a ’Register Now’ button and another with a ’Learn More’ button, you can use the content tag to separate the results from each ad in your Google Analytics reports.
If you’re interested in using campaign tags for your other marketing, then read my in-depth post on correctly tracking campaigns with Google Analytics.
You can use the Google Analytics URL Builder to create your campaign tags:
This tool allows you to enter the values for the campaign name, source, medium and content. Here’s an example for an ad on Facebook:
You need to enter the URL that people are going to click through to from the ad, along with the campaign tags we’ve covered. This will then create a long URL like this one:
https://site.com/spring?utm_source=facebook.com &utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Facebook%20Ads
This is the URL that we now use as the destination URL for our ad. When people click on the link they will be taken to the page we defined and the value for each tag will become available in our reports.
Heading to our reports, we will see the following for the people who have clicked through from our ad:
This allows us to see the number of users coming from the ad. The example also includes ecommerce data, allowing us to understand how successful our ads are at driving revenue. I’ve used ecommerce in this example, but this could just as easily be any goal you’ve configured for non-ecommerce actions taking place on your website.
Customized reports on Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a gem. As you probably know by now. And it’s even more useful when you are sufficiently proficient in its use to customize your own reports. Sometimes it gives you more information than you need, and others you need to go from one tab to anther to get all the information you need. There’s nothing like being able to set up your own report.
This can be done in the “Customisation” tab.
Conclusion
There are a lot of great websites out there which provide useful information on various aspects of social media. The problem is, it’s up to you to figure out who has the best info and where it’s located. That can be a lot of work. So, I’ve decided to put together this post with links to some of the best Google Analytics guides, tutorials, and tips you can find online.