How to measure a social media strategy with Google Analytics
Google Analytics offers various reports that provide relevant information about the impact that a company's social networks are having on users . This helps determine whether they are actually being used correctly or not.
We find different reports that can help us discover all this information and determine whether a good strategy is being carried out or not.
Channels Report
The channels report shows us all the ways through which traffic can reach the website (organic searches, referrals, etc.). If we are interested in seeing how social networks are working through this channel, we will have to go to:
Acquisition
All traffic
Channels
Social
Here, we will see a list of all the social networks that are being used, as shown in this image:
Screenshot 2019-03-06 at 8:59:55
If you click on each one, a metric will cio and cto email lists appear showing the network that performs best or worst. This way, you can get an idea of whether your strategy is working or not.
Additionally, if you click on Social Network and then filter by Landing Page , you will be able to see which pages are clicked on the most from each social network.
Screenshot 2019-03-06 at 9.01.07
Social Media Report
As expected, this tool also has a report dedicated exclusively to social networks . You can access it in the Acquisition section and then Social Media . The screen that appears is the following one.
Without a doubt, in the chosen example we see that the social networks that work best are Twitter and Facebook. Therefore, it would be convenient to generate specific content for these two and get the most out of them.
Screenshot 2019-03-06 at 9.02.02
Network References
This report shows a timeline of visits to a website via social media . To view this timeline, simply go to:
Acquisition
Social media
Network References
Screenshot 2019-03-06 at 9.03.00
Landing Pages
In the same column as Network Referrals , we find the Landing Pages , which we mentioned earlier. Here, we can see a series of URLs that show us the exact post through which users have reached the website.
Conversions
If you are an eCommerce or a company that sells products or services, this page is of interest to you, since you will be able to see perfectly how many users have become customers and why .
Another report similar to this one is the Conversion Paths report , which allows you to see the conversions in which a user has participated and the sales that have been closed for each channel . To obtain this report, you only have to click on:
Conversions
Multichannel funnels
Assisted conversions
However, if your website is simply an add-on to your business, this report doesn't make much sense.
Add-ons
This report shows the content that has been shared from a website using an embedded social button or widget . For example, a user has shared a post published on the company's blog on their own networks by clicking directly on the Twitter button that appears at the end of the post accompanied by a call to action such as, "Share it on your networks."
How to measure social media campaigns with Google Analytics
Sometimes, what you want to measure is not the behavior of users on a company's social networks, but rather the performance of a specific campaign launched through them. To do this, it is important that the URLs used have a UTM .
A UTM is nothing more than small pieces of text added to the end of the URL that are intended to help track the success of a website. In addition, it will be possible to obtain relevant data from a given campaign.
To do this, you will need to add 5 specific parameters after each URL. It should be noted that only the first three are mandatory.
