How To Social Media Tracking In Google Analytics

Every entrepreneur knows that if you're going to put in the effort, you have to know what's working for you. Because your time is limited as a solopreneur, this is very vital.

One of the nicest aspects of social media marketing is that practically everything can be measured. While this is great for data nerds like us, it might be a problem for solopreneurs who are just searching for data to transform into practical outcomes.

What about the in-app analytics monitoring features? Should you be utilizing Google Analytics for social media? You don't want to waste time measuring the incorrect things or metrics that don't help your company grow.

We'll show you how to define priorities and make the most of the time you spend monitoring in this post.

Start With Your Goals

The first step to seeing success from your social media is to set S.M.A.R.T goals for it.

Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely are the acronyms for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. Here's an explanation of what each of these terms means:

Specific: Goals that are too broad are difficult to attain. “We want to increase sales through social media”, is a noble goal, but it's tough to quantify and might mean various things to different individuals.

Measurable: You need to know if you've met your objective so you can track your progress. “We want more sales via social media”, for example, may become “We want to see a 2% increase in purchases from social media tracking”.

Attainable: We don't want to discourage you from setting ambitious objectives since they're exciting! If your aim is unreasonable, you'll be on your way to Frustration-Ville in no time, and Burn Out Town won't be far behind! Set yourself up for success by adjusting your expectations and setting realistic goals.

Relevant: Is your aim important to your company's bottom line? This is an excellent question to ask yourself, particularly when it comes to social media because it's all too easy to impress yourself with stats that have nothing to do with your bottom line. Recording record impression numbers, for example, is exciting, but they only count if you can link them to a S.M.A.R.T business goal.

Timely: Setting a deadline for your goal can help you stay focused on achieving it. “We want to see a 2% rise in purchases from traffic from social media by the end of Q2,” as our initial target said, may become “We aim to see a 2% increase in purchases from traffic from social media by the end of Q2.”

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Using Google Analytics for social media tracking

This is when Google Analytics becomes a valuable tool in your marketing arsenal. Using Google Analytics for social media will provide you with all of the information you want to evaluate your social media marketing efforts. Google Analytics' social media tracking provides information such as:

• What kinds of content themes do your readers respond to?
• Which platform is the most effective at driving visitors back to your website?
• What happens to your social media tracking once they arrive at your website? Is there any engagement or do they go immediately away?

When you have this information, you can optimize your content strategy and devote more time and focus to what works while eliminating what doesn't.

You should concentrate your Google Analytics social media tracking efforts on two areas: social acquisition and UTM marketing.

Here's how you save time by using Google Analytics for social media tracking.

Social acquisition

Google Analytics includes a whole area dedicated to “Acquisition,” or how users arrive at your website. On your Analytics homepage, you already have a glimpse of this.

This covers everything from referrals to organic search traffic, sponsored search traffic, to direct traffic from other websites (or traffic from people who directly type in your website address).

By selecting “All Traffic” and then “Channels” from the menu, you may get a breakdown of acquisition channels from all traffic.

This will provide you with an overview of where your website traffic originates, the proportion of new visitors, and how traffic behaves after they arrive at your site.

Use the Google Analytics social media features to gain a more thorough view of your website traffic from social media. Under the Acquisition drop-down, select the “Social” item.

There are numerous sections here that will provide you with information. The “Overview” part is the first. This offers you a fast overview of how social media traffic affects your total traffic as well as traffic from each social network. You'll also see the overall number of sessions from social media outlets compared to the total number of sessions.

You may go into “Network Referrals” to go a little deeper. This is where you'll get a breakdown of what's going on on each social network. You can get more specific information about any of the social networks by clicking on it, including which links are driving traffic and how long those visitors spent on your website.

What is the significance of this? Because if you're a blogger or a podcaster, you'll know exactly what topics your audience finds most engaging and what topics they find least interesting.

As a result, you'll be able to develop more material that your audience enjoys while avoiding what doesn't. You'll concentrate your time on things that have been proved to succeed, which may make all the difference in your success when time is tight.

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UTM campaigns

Let's pretend that other people are sharing your material on social media or that you're running Facebook or Instagram advertisements. You need to know how much of your traffic is generated by adverts and how much is generated by organic content sharing.

This is when Urchin Tracking Modules, often known as UTM parameters, come into play.

Do we get what you're thinking: “Urchin Tracking“?

Don't worry, they're not as difficult as they appear, and they don't have anything to do with sea urchins (Edgar was upset to learn this!).

UTMs are editable text strings that appear at the end of a URL and allow Google Analytics (or other tracking software) to better track visits to that specific link.

We go through UTMs in detail here, however, the key points to remember are:

1. UTMs provide you with a clear view of what's bringing people to your site.
2. UTMs may be used for any type of marketing, not only on social media.
3. You may set five different types of UTM parameters to better track your traffic. These are the following:

utm source
This specifies where your traffic comes from, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

utm medium
This specifies the source of your traffic, such as a newsletter, pay-per-click advertisements, or social media.

utm campaign
This specifies the campaign the URL belongs to. It may be anything like “blog” or “course launch.”

utm content
This is the point at which you can go quite particular with your tracking. If you use a different picture or call to action in your social postings, for example, you can use the content tag to identify that image or call to action so you can see which one gets the most traffic.

utm term
If you run Google AdWords advertising and want to see which precise keyword generated your traffic, terms are really useful.

If you run Google AdWords advertising and want to see which precise keyword generated your traffic, terms are really useful.

You do not need to utilize all of these options. If you're just getting started, pick the ones that make the most sense.

For example, if all you care about is figuring out which subjects perform best, you may utilize the utm campaign source to distinguish between your various content topics. You may also use the utm source function if you're solely interested in how Facebook compares to LinkedIn. Don't make it too difficult!

Whatever you do, keep your UTM names constant so you don't get confused about which campaign or piece of material is linked to which. To avoid any misunderstanding, make sure you know what each parameter's name is before you start setting it up.

You may use the Google Campaign URL Builder to put up your UTM parameters if you're clear on the different titles for each parameter.

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If you're an as-educate user and want to try out UTMs, we've got you covered!

as-educate's UTM parameters are set by default, which means that whether you use ed.gr or Rebrandly as your link shortener, Edgar will add UTM parameters at the end of your URLs. You should disable Edgar's UTM functionality on the Settings page if you already use your UTM tags in your URLs.

How To Measure UTMs

In Google Analytics, go to the Campaign area and measure UTMs there. From the All Campaigns area, you can examine your metrics in a few different ways.

You have the option of seeing data at the campaign, source, medium, or source/medium levels.

Here's a fantastic example of how you can utilize UTM to figure out which marketing efforts are bringing in the most traffic.

Our as-educate newsletter is one of our top campaign drivers, as you can see below.

We'd want to know which of our newsletters receives the most traffic so we can see which topics our subscribers are most interested in. We can observe which week's email brought in the most traffic by using UTMs, which allows us to go back and evaluate them, discover the themes that succeeded, and continue to create material that pertains to those issues.

Remember how we said you should name your UTMs with care? This is where it matters! If you're not sure how you titled your UTMs, things might rapidly become confused.

Why are Google Analytics and social media important?

“Half of the advertising money I spend is squandered; the problem is, I'm not sure which half”

John Wanamaker

This phrase is one of our favorites because it encapsulates how many business owners feel about their marketing. They have a hard time figuring out what's going on, but it doesn't have to be that way!

You have all the tools you need to measure your data thanks to digital marketing. With the right data, you can optimize your marketing approach and get the most out of your marketing spend.

In the comments, tell us how you utilize Google Analytics to track the leads you get from social media.