Drill-down into your social activity

Following on from our July marketing seminar, last month we provided you with a blog dedicated to the importance of Google Analytics and what your business should be measuring. As promised, in this blog we delve deeper into the world of social analytics to provide you with additional tools to help you make sense of your social media presence.
Identifying social media ROI is a difficult task for any business.  We have seen a dramatic rise in the number of businesses using social media within their marketing mix over the last few years; however, many have jumped on the bandwagon with little consideration for the actual benefits to their business. Identifying ROI has been, for the most part, fairly elusive for marketers and business owners; provoking questions such as, ‘How do I know if social media activity will generate business?  Is this really an effective way to spend my time?’

In the past, a measurement of social media success was determined by the number of followers or ‘Likes’ generated through Facebook and Twitter. Many businesses struggled to see the bigger picture, often basing their decisions on assumptions, because defining a meaningful ROI was difficult. However, recent changes to Google Analytics have helped ensure marketers and businesses owners are now better informed about the impact of their social media activities on their website traffic, helping them establish how to spend their social media time and budget most effectively.

Google Analytics have taken their social analytics tools a step further with the intention of delivering the following information:

• The full value of traffic to your website coming from social networking sites and the ability to measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions.
• What social activities are happening both on and off of your site to help you optimise user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs.

So how will the latest Google Analytics developments help businesses achieve the above?

New data is now available under the “Social” tab in Google Analytics, which includes:

Overview:

The overview report provides data from all the other social reports and contains a Social Value visualisation of how social networks contribute to website conversions.

Sources:

The Sources report shows the source activity based on social referrers. Google unifies different URLs that can be used to send traffic from one social network. For example, Twitter can send traffic from both twitter.com and t.co. Traffic from both sources are combined under the category of Twitter.

Pages:

This report highlights social activity per page, what happened on and off the site.

Conversions:

The Conversions data provides a quick view of which social sources drove conversions on the site.

Social Plugins:

Social Plugins is a summary of pages and the social activity that happened, such as clicking on a like, tweet or +1 button.

Social Visitors Flow:

Social Visitors Flow is a visual presentation of how visitors from social properties are navigating your website. Assuming the goal of your social media campaign is to get more traffic to your website, this report gives you insight into which social platforms are sending the most traffic to your site and what your social visitors are doing once they get there.

The reports available have the ability to drill-down further into data and reflect things like comments, shares or likes to help you identify successful social media campaigns and what works for your business.

At TLC Business, we believe measuring the ROI of any marketing activity is essential, the new tools from Google Analytics will help you perfect, tailor and manage your social media campaigns, helping you make the most your time.

Install, sign in and start measuring your Google Analytics today.