Measuring Social Media With Google Analytics

Have you been looking for a way to measure your social media efforts?

If so, then you will want to look at the recently released Google Analytics Social reports. The reports are designed to help you connect social media to the business metrics you care about – like conversions (sales, sign ups, etc.).

The new reports are geared to help you:

Identify the value of traffic coming from social sites
Measure direct conversions or future conversions from that traffic
Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site
Make better, data-driven decisions related to social media marketing

Use the Social reports see a more complete picture of social impact on your site. Below is a quick summary of some of the new information the social reports in Google Analytics will provide.

Here is a sample screen shot of Overview Report.

The Overview report show you the value of conversions generated from your social channels. I like how this report shows you not only the conversions that were immediately preceded by a social interaction (last interaction social conversions) but it also show you conversions where social played a part, but was not that last interaction (assisted social conversions). As you can imagine, I would expect “assisted” circle to be much larger for professional service firms and other B2B firms.

The Conversions Report shows the conversion rates of each social network and the monetary value (based on the goal values you have set up) they drive to your business. Here is a what the conversions report looks like:

In order to learn how people are interacting with your content and whether they are taking action or not, look to the social sources report. The social sources report looks like a typical GA graph so I won’t bother including one here.

Ever wonder if having all of those sharing buttons on your site is really helping or not? The Social Plugin report shows which pages and posts on your site are receiving the most attention and which social buttons (twitter, +1, etc.) are being clicked to share them.

The Activity Stream is a very cool report that shows what most small business owners want to know – the impact that social engagement is having on your website.

The Activities Stream tab shows how people are engaging your content off your site across the social web.

For content that was shared publicly, you can see the links they shared, how and where they shared and what they had to say. Currently, most of the activities will come from Google+, but that should expand in the future.

The new social reports are currently being rolled out over the next few weeks, so keep a look out for them. They will show up under the Standard Reporting Tab.

The new social reports for Google Analytics are included in our managed marketing services and managed website programs, so if you are a current customer we’ll be covering these reports in one of your next review sessions.