Google Analytics is undoubtedly the best
free web analytics software available for blogs, website owners,
e-tailers, and any other kind of website. It helps tracks sales,
conversions, sign ups, lead generation data, demographic data,
geographical statistics, and much more! If you’re a business owner, it’s
likely that your website already has the Google Analytics tracking code
in place. If not, you need to get it now.
Other metrics like bounce rate are
critical for understanding why users are leaving your website. Google
Analytics provides statistics on metrics that ultimately help you get
more customers, better visibility, and a higher return on investment.
An analytics tool is integral for
determining essential metrics that help analyze the success of your
business. Demographic data will help you get clarity on your target
audience and fine tune your website content, products, and services to
cater to this audience set. Similarly, by observing the geographical
location of your website, it is possible to provide information that
helps users in a particular location make informed buying decisions.
When using Google Analytics to track
website traffic and other metrics, all you need to do is create an
Analytics profile and install the code on all pages of your website.
Analytics will then start tracking data within 24 hours of code
installation.
Business owners also benefit from several sophisticated features such as goals, funnels, and e-commerce tracking.
Google Analytics has been used
successfully to track performance on pay-per-click advertising, and it
has now launched social interaction analytics, which measure performance
for social media marketing campaigns.
First, let’s understand why it’s important to track efficacy in a social media marketing campaign.
Many social networks provide a vast
reach to business owners but fail to provide statistics like the number
of people they’ve reached out to, the success of the campaign, and what
pages on the website received visits through social networks. A few
social media management dashboards, like Hoot Suite, have an analytics
dashboard to measure the success rate of status updates, tweets, and
posts. However, these are woefully inadequate for truly measuring a
campaign’s success as they don’t tie in clicks to dollars spent.
One may argue that numbers of likes,
number of shares, or numbers of followers are the only parameters
necessary on social media. While this is somewhat true, there are more
important things to consider – such as number of visits, pages per
visit, time spent on site, and bounce rate.
There are two ways of tracking social
traffic – one is by using a new feature that Analytics calls social
interaction analytics and the other is by using tagged URLs.
Social interaction analytics helps track
likes, tweets, and +1’s, while tagged URLs help in tracking website
visits from different social channels.
Social Interaction Analytics
Website owners can use social
interaction analytics to track activity from three social networks –
Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. To use social interaction analytics, you
must first use the new version of Analytics.
Install the like, send, and share
buttons from Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. You can find these on the
respective websites. These codes then need to be appended with a short
snippet of code from Analytics. Follow the instructions here and here to know how this is done.
It’s best if you consult with your web
designer about installing social plug-ins. If you use post likes and
shares, you may have to append each single code with the Google
Analytics social tracking code.
Tagged URLs
Tagged URLs are the easiest way to track
social media traffic received on a specific website or blog post link.
They are far easier to set up, but they only provide data about the
people who visited your website or post after seeing the link on a
social network. Tagged URLs cannot provide information on the number of
shares, likes, etc.
Visit the Analytics URL builder
on the Google Analytics Help Center to set up a tagged URL. Once on
this page, you will see several mandatory fields such as campaign source
and campaign medium.
The campaign source should always
include the name of the social network you are sharing the link on. This
helps in identifying data when it appears on your Analytics feed.
Remember, you will need to set up different tagged URLs for different
social networks.
The campaign medium is indicates where
the click will come from – such as from email, status update, or banned
ad. For Facebook, the campaign medium will be status update, while for
Twitter, it will be a tweet.
Make sure you use some method of
tracking social media performance as it will help you tweak and improve
the campaign and consequently, get better results from it.
Author Bio: Khushboo Aulakh contributes on behalf of Broadband Genie, the social shopping & consumer website for broadband deals
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