How to Measure Social Media Effectively
Contents 3 Introduction 4 Google Analytics & Social Media 5 Gathering & Comparing Social Media Data 6 Digging Deeper 7 Assisted Conversions 8 Assessing Social Media Campaigns 9 Mobile Traffic 10 Custom Campaign URLs 11 Now What? 12 Facebook Insights 13 Twitter Analytics 14 LinkedIn Analytics 15 YouTube Analytics 16 Instagram Analytics: Iconosquare 17 Pinterest Analytics 18 Google+ Insights 19 Other Social Media Measurement Tools 20 Summary 21 Contact Us
HOW TO MEASURE SOCIAL MEDIA EFFECTIVELY
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Introduction Social Media is becoming a bigger and bigger part of the way customers and clients communicate with businesses, and vice versa. The networks themselves are aware of this, too, with each of the major players providing their own analytic platforms. Even with all this data available, from Google Analytics and beyond, it’s not always easy to see larger patterns and accurately gauge campaign success. That’s why we’ve put together this detailed eBook, filled with top tips on turning your mountain of data into a more refined molehill of actionable insights. Read on to discover how to measure social media effectively, in a way that will benefit both your business and online communities.
HOW TO MEASURE SOCIAL MEDIA EFFECTIVELY
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Google Analytics & Social Media When it comes to any kind of online data reporting, it’s unlikely that Google Analytics will be anything less than a crucial element. However, in the case of social media data, you are limited by the amount you can glean from Google Analytics, partly because Google wants to push its own platform, Google+, more heavily, and partly because some social media platforms, like Facebook, keep their data in a “walled garden”, not allowing tools like Google Analytics to access it. That being said, there are still plenty of learnings available to you about the various ways in which social media affects traffic to your website, and this is where Google Analytics comes in very useful indeed. To get the most value out of the things Google Analytics can teach you about your social media efforts, it’s vital that you set up Google Analytics Goal Tracking on your website. A lot of the data you can get about social media is centred around online conversions (such as sales, contact points or completions of a sign-up form), and without goal tracking set up, you’ve no way to record how much social media is worth, financially.
“It’s vital that you set up Google Analytics Goal Tracking on your website.” HOW TO MEASURE SOCIAL MEDIA EFFECTIVELY
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Gathering & Comparing Social Media Data Whether you’ve just launched your social media presences or have a whole bunch of social campaigns on the go at once, looking at how people are coming through to your website is crucial to understanding how social media works for you. You can access an at-a-glance overview of traffic through social media by clicking ‘Acquisitions’ then ‘Channels’ in the left hand menu of Google Analytics, then ‘Social’ in the chart you’re presented with. This view shows you data on the sessions (what Google used to call ‘visits’) that came through social media platforms. From here you can compare the quality of different traffic sources. Here are the stats you should be looking out for and comparing: Sessions: The big one, but not always the most important. This metric shows the number of sessions on your website which have resulted from a clickthrough on social media. % New Sessions: What you want this to show depends on your website type. Offering an online system that people log on to? You’ll expect this stat to be quite low, as regular users return to your website to use your service. However, if you want a quick turnaround of new visitors, at an ecommerce store for example, you’ll want this to be high. Bounce Rate: The social network providing you with the most sessions might seem great but what if they’re all just turning up at your site then waddling off without looking further? The bounce rate for each social network will give you a good indication of how much this is occurring. With this figure, you can get an idea of which social platforms are providing you with people genuinely interested in your business.
HOW TO MEASURE SOCIAL MEDIA EFFECTIVELY
Pages / Session & Avg. Session Duration: Like Bounce Rate, these metrics give you an idea of the quality of traffic coming through to your site via social. Any social network providing visitors that stick around on your site are certainly worth investing time and effort in. Conversions: The second big one. The worth of social media can’t always be accurately gauged in financial terms, but you can have a good go of it by checking out which social platforms lead to the most conversions on your site. Compare this data to visitor quality and you might discover some surprising things. For example, what if the most conversions come from people who don’t stick around on your site for a while, or as referrals from a social network you weren’t expecting? One important thing to remember when looking at all this data: time. Don’t just compare the data recorded on a single day; look at it over a period of a month or months to learn which times of month or week are particularly successful for you. Is there a time of week when you get lots of sessions through social but not many through organic search (or vice versa)? This will help you to adjust your social media campaigns to target your most successful periods.
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Digging Deeper Sure, you can get a lot of info from Google’s own ‘Social’ data aggregation, but just click ‘Acquisitions’ then ‘All Referrals’ on the left hand menu of Google Analytics and you’ll see that there’s a lot more to be gained. This view shows where all visits to your site that weren’t through organic search or advertising came from, including sessions through social media. (Tip: Don’t confuse the data in ‘All Referrals’ with the data in the ‘Referrals’ section of ‘Channels’. ‘All Referrals’ brings together the data from both the ‘Social’ and ‘Referrals’ channels.) Here you can compare the successes of social networks with the performance of particular social advertising platforms such as Struq, and also with any referrals through online press mentions or websites such as forums, where people are linking to yours. It’s not exactly a doddle to see the social referrals in the midst of all these other ones, but here are a few tips that can help. Facebook now has a bunch of prefixes for URLs that signify certain things but end up spreading the data around in Google Analytics. These are URLs like ‘m.facebook.com’ (signifying mobile visits) and ‘l.facebook.com’ (signifying the use of a vanity Facebook URL that has been encrypted for privacy when sharing links). Our advice? Just search ‘facebook’ in the ‘All Referrals’ view and you’ll be shown all the Facebook referral types together.
HOW TO MEASURE SOCIAL MEDIA EFFECTIVELY
m.facebook.com should be of particular interest as it shows the number of referrals from the Facebook mobile app. Take a look at the quality (Bounce Rate, Pages / Session, Avg. Session Duration) and conversions of these sessions and compare them to referrals from ‘facebook.com’ (the desktop site); is there a trend? Do people ‘on the go’ spend less time on your site per visit? Maybe there’s a way you can adjust your site or use Facebook to ensure people browse your site so much they miss their stop! Just as you would for your credit card statement, always research any entry in your referrals that you’re not familiar with, social or not, particularly if it’s providing a reasonable amount of sessions, as you’ll want to understand where your visits are coming from in order to maximise and improve them. Oh, and if you’re looking for Twitter referrals, you’ll find them listed as ‘t.co’ here.
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