ANALYSE YOUR SOCIAL PRESENCE

Decoding Google Analytics With Teena Thach

 

TEENA THACH

 

When it comes to marketing on social, it is important to know what channel is working better than the others. You could be raking in the retweets on Facebook or swimming in shares on Twitter, but if that engagement isn’t doing anything to grow your business, something needs to change.

In order to measure your social media performance and distinguish social presence, marketers need to know how to monitor and understand social analytics.

In general, there are two types of analytics you’ll need to monitor to get a complete view of your social presence. Measuring engagement metrics through a social media management tool gives you a good idea of your success on each platform but it doesn’t give you the whole story.

Tracking conversion metrics on your website, landing pages or other lead generation channels is an important part of understanding which social networks are bringing you real leads and real ROI. For this type of social analytics, one of the best tools available to you is Google Analytics.

Most marketers see Google Analytics as nothing but a simple way to track simple website metrics. That’s because for the past six years, website traffic has been listed as the most used metric. Luckily, marketers are finally coming around to the truly important measures of success.

According to Content Marketing Institute, the three most important metrics this year were:

  • Sales lead quality (87%)
  • Sales (84%)
  • Conversion Rates (82%)

For social media marketers looking to improve these metrics, Google Analytics can actually inform a good deal of your social media strategy. The tool provides you with data about where your website visitors are coming from and what actions they take while on your website. Integrating this data with your social media analytics allow you to determine which social media channels and messages have the most impact.

 

Setting Up Google Analytics

 

If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account, you can easily set one up for free. Once you have the Google Analytics tracking code set up on your website, blog and landing pages, you can look at the sources of the traffic you are receiving.

Under Acquisition you can find the Social tab and choose Network Referrals. This page provides you with an overview of all of the website traffic you’ve received through each social network. By clicking on a specific network, you can see how well each link performed.

Another area of Google Analytics you’ll need to make use of to measure conversion metrics are goals. Creating a goal informs Google what specific actions on your webpages you consider to be a conversion. This will allow you to track the success of your social presence in actual leads and dollar amounts. For more information on setting up goals, check out the Google Analytics guide.

Using this information, you can gain several key insights into your social presence:

 

Tracking Your Success  

 

Once your analytics are configured, you can get very specific about how you track your social media activity. If you look at your referrals in Google you may notice “t.co” links. Twitter automatically shortens every link you share into t.co format to allow even more insights. If you use a social media tool like HubSpot or Socedo, the link will automatically be shortened using their tracking information as well.

This lets you know not only what links are performing best, but what specific posts those links are tied to. Knowing which posts generated the most traffic and the most leads allows you to tweak your messaging to find the right way to reach your audience.

 

A/B Testing Landing Pages For Your Social Offers

 

If your social media goal is lead generation, one of your most important tools will be your landing pages. A high converting landing page can be seen as an art form, but it’s more accurately described as a science experiment. Through A/B testing you can zero in on the exact elements that make a strong landing page.

Google Analytics makes it easy to set up A/B testing for the links you are sharing on social media. Under Behavior, choose Experiments and create a new experiment.

 

Optimising Your Social Engagement

 

Once you identify the best social media leads for your business you can begin to target these types of leads more directly with an optimized social media campaign. Through Google Analytics you can identify the specific channels, messages and landing pages that result in the most conversions. By integrating your Google Analytics with a demand generation tool like Socedo you can begin to optimize how you engage with your audience, the timing of your engagement and the overall conversion funnel you are leading prospects through.

According to FierceCMO, 74% of marketers recognise that capturing and applying data to inform and drive marketing activities is the new reality. Despite this fact, only 39% are using customer data and behavior patterns to shape their marketing strategy. This gives you an opportunity to be ahead of the curve.

Google Analytics provides you with some excellent tools for tracking your social presence (for free). Combine these with a well optimized demand generation strategy and your social media will begin raking in the leads.

How do you use Google Analytics to measure your social media?

Let us know in the comments!!

MEET TEENA THACH

 

TEENA THACH

 

Teena Thach is a social media and marketing specialist @ SocedoSOCEDO

Socedo is a demand generation system that empowers marketers to discover, engage with and qualify prospects through social media to generate revenue at scale.

 

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