Yesterday, I was lucky enough to speak at Social Media FTW here in Portland. Social Media FTW is a nice local conference helping local businesses figure out all this social media stuff. I had the tough task of talk about social media planning, policies and measuring at the end of a long day of great content.
I tried to make it as fun as possible but thought I would take a few minutes to talk about some of the more advanced features we talked about here and give you more resources to get started.
Google’s URL Builder
You may have noticed when you click on a link on a social media site or someplace else, that when it opens in your browser it is much longer. It may contain ?utm and then a bunch of numbers. What that long link is doing is tracking where that link came from, perhaps from what network and campaign. You can do that too!
Using the Google URL Builder you can tag your links with the Source, Medium and Campaign Name of you links and keep track in Analytics how that particular campaign link worked. Take that long link, shorten it with a service like Bit.ly and post it to see how it performs.
Creating Advanced Segments in Google Analytics
By creating Advanced Segments in Google Analytics you can create reports tailored to your specific needs. For social media you can put multiple sources together. The example I gave was to aggregate all of the different traffic you have coming from Twitter (even though now we have t.co).
Once you have that segment set up, you can compare how your Twitter traffic is performing versus all of the other traffic from your site etc. This can tell you more about the Twitter users that come to their site, what they are interested in and how engaged they are.
Google Custom Reports
You can create a Google Custom report and just display the information that is most important to you, just the way you want to see it. To set up a custom Social Media Report you can choose the Metrics that are most important to you, then add a Filter to include all of your social media URLs for the sites you are participating on.
Once you have that set up, you will have a Custom Report that just lets you look at that data you want. You can compare social media site to social media site and even compare date ranges (how one month did to the last).
If you cannot see this video, watch it on YouTube
Multi-channel Funnels
This is so cool (in a nerdy way). Social Media is hard to track the ROI of because often it isn’t the last action someone does before completing a sale or making the deal. It DOES help in the decision making process, in building trust and in getting your content, products and services in front of new eyeballs.
With multi-channel funnels, what you will hopefully be able to do is track each touchpoint that someone had with your website. Maybe they found you on a social network first, then later they Googled you and maybe the final sale was made when they saw your PPC ad, clicked on it and contacted you. With Multi-Channel Funnels, Google Analytics is trying to track that.
With that information you can see all the different places someone came into contact with your website, notice trends in the conversion paths, see where your overlap is and get an idea of how many impressions it is taking for people to convert on your site
For Multi-Channel Funnels to work you need to go to the New Version of Analytics (top right hand corner) and have goals set up on your site to track conversions.
If you cannot see this video, watch it on YouTube
Social Interaction Analytics
With Social Interaction Analytics you can finally measure the impact of the social sharing buttons on your website. This is also in the new version of Google Analytics. What you are doing is adding some modifications to the javascript Google gives you to put on your site. After this is set up, you can see what social actions are happening on your site and compare that data against itself month on month, quarter on quarter etc.
This one is pretty complicated. Google explains it here, Social Media Examiner explains it a little better here (for us common folks).
There you go! That is enough information to get you into some serious trouble! Thanks so much to everyone who made it to my presentation. The full slides are below. Let me know if you have any questions!
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