Measuring your social media impact

How to measure visits from social media traffic.

Google Analytics makes this process very simple for any website owner.

To understand traffic, use Google Analytics Social Reports, which show site data generated directly from over 400 social sites.

• Open your Google Analytics account.
• Select the Traffic Sources tab.
• From the Social drop down menu, select the Overview page.
• Record Visits and Visits via Social Referral into your spreadsheet.

 If the people visiting your page only do it once, then you’re not executing a long-term web strategy. Ideally, you want to create loyal visitors who frequent your site.

Another very important aspect of visitor loyalty is to understand on average how many visits are required for one of your visitors to convert.

A conversion could be a visitor purchasing from your site, signing up for an email newsletter or downloading an ebook.

How to measure visitor loyalty from social media.

This measurement requires a one-time setup step (Part A), but once completed it can be easily reused for future measuring (Part B).

You’ll need to create a custom segment inside Google Analytics specific to your social media traffic.

Visitor loyalty numbers will depend greatly on your site type, your readers and the content you produce. Therefore, it’s important to look at your baseline levels, set a goal and measure your trend over time.

Part A—Setup

1. Open Google Analytics, and click into your Admin panel.
2. Click the Advanced Segments link. Click Create + New Segment.
3. Name this new segment “Social Media Sources.”
4. Click the green drop down menu and select the green Source. Inside the text input box, enter the URL of one social media site, such as “Facebook.com.”
5. Click the Add OR Statement, then click Add a Dimension, and again select Source to add another site. Repeat Step #4 to add another social media referring source such as Twitter.
6. Repeat Step #5 to add all major social media sources, such as Facebook, Twitter, t.co, YouTube, StumbleUpon and Digg. Once these have been added to your Custom Segment, click the Save Segment button.

Part B—Measuring Loyalty

1. From Google Analytics Standard Reporting, select the Audience tab.
2. From the Behavior drop down menu, select the Frequency & Recency page.
3. Click the Advanced Segments tab, check your custom Social Media Sources, and hit the Apply button.
4. Add the percentage of total Visits (top percent number) for the first three Count of Visits rows (3 visits or fewer) and subtract this percentage from 100% to calculate your Regulars value. Record your Regulars percentage on your spreadsheet. My goal is to increase my Regulars percentage over time.

 

Most business owners want to understand the direct relationship between social activities and sales.

You should know the traffic source for any important business goal and these goals should be set up in Google Analytics or your software of choice.

For most of you, the most important web goal is a visitor converting to a lead captured by entering personal information into one of your web forms. For businesses that conduct the majority of business online, these goals are the lifeblood of the organization and are key measures of success.

Even if you’re just getting started acquiring customers or leads online, you should make this measurement a primary focus of your efforts.

How to measure conversions from social media.

Using the Social Reports within Google Analytics, we can understand the specific value of each social network. Of course, you need to have goals set up within Google Analytics for the conversion information to be displayed.

Do the following:

1. Open your Google Analytics account.
2. Select the Traffic Sources tab.
3. From the Social drop down menu, select the Conversions page.

     4.Record Conversions and Conversion Value into your spreadsheet. Consider recording this value more often than monthly.