Social media is an essential platform for creating brand awareness and gaining the attention of your audience. However, just creating social media posts and uploading them on your brand’s social channels is not enough. You should also know if your posts are succeeding and achieving the results you desire with your target audience in mind.
Looking at every post for views and likes is quite a task, especially if you post many posts daily. And just considering likes and views of your posts on social isn’t giving you the full picture. This when Google Analytics comes to your rescue. With Google Analytics, you can truly analyze the impact of this traffic on your website.
There are plenty of analytics tools in the market, which helps with tracking social media traffic, but Google Analytics is one of the most efficient traffic measurement tools. Let’s first glance at some stats related to social media website traffic.
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Social media traffic overview
Social media can be a serious source of traffic to your website. This recent report from the team at Databox shows the results of a survey highlighting the percentage of traffic accounted for by social media across respondents’ websites. As you can see from the results, a significant number of respondents stated that anywhere from 11% to >50% of their site traffic comes from social.
To ensure you are leveraging the traffic visiting your website from social to its fullest, you need to be accurately measuring the results and the implications. That’s where a tool like Google Analytics comes into play.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is the most used and most loved tools by marketers for so many reasons. First, it is a free and easy to use tool that provides in-depth traffic details for websites as well as social media sites. This traffic data can play a crucial role in developing your business’ marketing strategies.
If you are new to Google Analytics, here is a quick overview of why you should use Google Analytics for your business.
Advantages of using Google Analytics
- Know how much engagement your content creates
- It showcases the ‘bounce rate’ data of your content.
- Know the social media Demographics
- The ROI of your campaigns
- Tracking email traffic
- How much time viewers spent on your page
- …and so much more
Advantages of using Google Analytics for Social Media
- Google Analytics tracks traffic from all your social media accounts and shows you which social sites are creating the best engagement.
- You will know how much time your audience is spending on your posts. This data helps in analyzing the most engaging posts. Thus, you will figure out what really interests your site visitors. Take note of engaging posts and include them often to increase engagement even further or to generate ROI.
- Google Analytics provides a high-level overview as well as the ability to really drill down to the specific of your traffic coming from social media.
How to View Social media Traffic in Google Analytics?
Here are a few steps you should follow to check your social media traffic using Google Analytics.
- Open Google Analytics and login, choose your website, the one you wish to view insights.
- Move to the taskbar on the left, slide through this sequence: Acquisition > All traffic > channels.
- Click on the Social column, social media traffic report of your social site will appear.
Different views of Social Media Traffic Data
Google Analytics will show social media traffic data in tabular form by default. However, it’s not the only way to view your data. GA offers different ways of viewing your traffic data, you can also view in the following ways:
Percentage view: Data here is represented with a pie chart, showcasing contribution to the total of the selected metric. Percentage view is best to used when you to have a quick analysis of your social media site performance.
Comparison view: Select metric performance to the site average data is represented through bar charts. This view helps users compare data on different sites or pages. For example, you can compare the average time users spend on your website compared to your specific pages and more.
Pivot: This unique view can make your task way easy; it is used to view multiple dimensions of data at once, for data trends. For example use pivot to open by source and later view by average duration on pages from several landing pages.
Performance: this view will showcase related performance for the metrics through a horizontal bar chart. This view helps you analyze metrics when the percentage view might fail.
Percentage view: can show a number of visits on-site for different references – but for viewing pages per visit, performance view is what you will need.
Cloud view: Want to know about your sites keywords? The Cloud view showcases the most popular keywords of your sites. You can see the list of primary as well as secondary keyword, this way you can analyze your website traffic and know what performing better and what’s not.
Conclusion
That all folks! Analyze your social media regularly with these simple steps, and see what works best for your audience. We hope this blog helps. Don’t forget to share your feedback with us in the comments.
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- How to Track Social Media Traffic With Google Analytics - April 29, 2020
