Social Media Analytics Simplified

In most cases, Social Media is the best source for acquiring quality traffic to a website. Due to the complex and intertwined interactions in your social media networks, this makes it quite difficult when it comes to Social Media analytics.

In my opinion, within the context of Traffic Acquisition, there are three major KPIs to consider for measurement with regards to your online presence in the social media world. They are:

1. Actions, when someone, including you, takes the initiative such as Like, Share, Re-Tweet, Comment or so on. This creates opportunities for acquiring traffic form social media networks.
2. Reactions, when someone visits your website as a result of Actions, and engages with your content.
3. Revenue, where Actions and Reactions result in sales.

No matter what your analytics BFF is, measuring the Action is about tracking all those Likes, Shares, Comments and similar, and in analytics language, it is usually a click tracking which constitutes a little bit of coding.

Measuring Reaction however is about looking at traffic Referrals and filtering it out by known social media networks, or if you have tagged the URLs, checking out the Campaign report. In most cases you do both, simply because we have control on our Actions, but not much on others’.

Using Google Analytics makes you very lucky because there is a way to get a report for Reactions simply by looking into Traffic Source > Social > Sources. This was added to GA reports earlier this year and is a very comprehensive way of looking into your social media efforts. The report shows where actual traffic originated from more than 400 social media networks and saves you a great deal of time.

On the Page report, you will see which social media networks drive the most trafic and a Conversion report is an absolute gold mine for your business; it gives you a clear understanding of which network generates better sales on your website.

You may want to segment the report to see the impacts on a specific content or section of your website, or to see which keyword performs better in your AdWords campaigns. If you have already set up event tracking for measuring Actions, it is a great idea to create a segment and figure out which Actions generates better Reactions.

I love social media analytics, hopefully you love it too by now!!!