How To Measure Social Media Traffic With Google Analytics?

Ability to track big data has created lots of hopes and expectations from social media that has emerged as the biggest source of traffic and revenue for websites. With Google Analytics, you can have total control of your social media marketing and traffic.

Here’re 8 ways in which GA can help in leveraging social medi.a for getting targeted traffic to your site.

1 Audience targeting

Social media campaigns get hundreds of clicks but no all clicks are same. It is for the marketers to go through every click to make sure that it comes from the targeted audience. Here only Google Analytics could help as social media platform analytics give information from the perspective of networking sites.

Working as a tool, Google Analytics provides comprehensive information on demographics and interest targeting. Also, the information can be filtered to get results for specific media platforms. Comprehensive information from GA could provide real help in demographics and interest targeting.

2# User Explorer

Visitors are anonymous but they make footprints on the site. The User Explorer can follow those footprints to see how get interesting information on first time visitors, repeat customers, pages visited and time spent on each visit. The information is helpful in understanding how visitors engage with your website content.

3# Conversions

Ecommerce sales, email signups, lead form submission and sessions including visits to specific pages are called conversions. Google Analytics default setting shows source of the “last click” like PPC, email, referral and direct. It is called “last click” attribution model in which the final click that converted into a desired action is noticed and its source traced. This model excludes earlier visits.

Google Analytics allows users to filter the results for a complete picture of the “last click” model. GA gives details of previous visits and also shows sources of those visits. It draws complete picture showing contribution of different channels before the “last click” visit.

4# Model comparison tools

Google Analytics default setting give short-sighted view of “last click” but there is model comparison tool to expand the data and have a bigger view to the conversion. Users can choose any model from “last click” to “first click” and “linear” according to their convenience and understanding. Also they are free to import models or customize their models.

These model comparison tools are easy to use and also Google has links to interesting content related to use of these tools. Users shouldn’t have any difficulty in accessing the tools and understanding how these tools can help in making reports.

5# Assisted conversions

It isn’t a new concept but it came into prominence only after attribution became a factor in digital marketing. Its advantage is that it provides a clear picture of different channels contributing to the growth of website traffic. Google Analytics can track multiple sessions of “last click”. It shows previous sources of visitors.

6# Top conversion paths

Google Analytics shows complete journey of visitors and their sources. The report highlights what combination of social media sources resulted in visits and frequency of those visits. While the assisted conversion shows aggregated stats, the conversion paths track complete journey.

7# Social reports

Google Analytics specific reports can show whether your social media optimization is meeting the goal. The reports are added to GA to show social media activity and their results. These reports can even be filtered to specific social media sites to track conversion specific platforms.

8# Benchmarking

The benchmark report on Google Analytics gives traffic comparison of a site with others in the industry. You can even compare your traffic with different industries and segments using drop down menu and changing the industries.

Conclusion

Google Analytics helps in understanding social media traffic by providing a complete picture of traffic and its sources. Starting from “last click” to “first click”, GA has the capability to track the potential sources of traffic.