It’s not just about likes, shares and comments. Have you ever wondered how much traffic a certain Facebook post or Tweet sent to your website? There are plenty of tools out there that will allow you to see referral traffic but fail to tell you the specifics of what post(s) drove that traffic. Figuring out which links are driving the most amount traffic can be vital when optimizing and aligning your social media efforts. You will be able to generate reports on channel and campaign behavior, value, and profitability. For instance, maybe referrals from your Facebook postings tend to spend more time on your site than visitors coming from your PPC campaign. Thus, reallocating more resources to Facebook could be advantageous.
This article will show you how to take your social media marketing to the next level with social analytics.
Google Analytics Custom Campaigns
It all starts with assigning a custom campaign to the links you want to share in Google Analytics. With custom campaigns, you are able to add parameters to any URL you own that links to your site or app and collect more information about your referral traffic. Some of the information that you’ll be able to collect is:
- How many users clicked on your link
- How many pages were viewed on average per visit
- Average time spent on site from user and what percentage were new visitors
These insights are a valuable tool when figuring out how well certain content and/or social networking sites are working.
8 steps for Setting Up a Custom Campaign in Google Analytics
- Add Custom Campaign parameters to your URLs with Google Analytics Custom Campaign Builder.
- Enter the destination page you wish to send users to in the Website URL field
- Enter campaign source to identify where visits are coming from (Twitter, email newsletter, Facebook, Google+)
- Enter Campaign Medium to identity how the link was delivered (tweet, wall post)
- Enter Campaign Term (this can be something like a hashtag if Twitter is the source)
- Enter Campaign Name that the link supports
- Click the Generate URL button to create the URL based on your specified campaign parameters. (Note: After you’ve created your custom link you can put it though a URL shortener without affecting its parameters.
- Analyze the data from your campaign
5 Easy Steps for Analyzing Custom Campaign
Once you’ve created your custom campaign, you can analyze your campaigns effectiveness.
- Log into your Google Analytics account
- Click on Traffic Sources
- Click on Traffic Sources > Sources
- Click on Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns
- Click on the campaign you wish to analyze
I don’t think a lot of marketers take advantage of this useful tool. It can really help you understand channel effectiveness and enable you to better measure your social media ROI.
What are your thoughts? Have you ever created custom URLs and campaigns before and tracked their results? If not, do you plan on giving it a try? Drop us a line below and let us know!
