Google Analytics Adds Social Reports for Measuring Social Marketing Results

We’re constantly telling you the importance of social media marketing in addition to stressing measurement of ROI for your marketing efforts. But how do you go about applying metrics to social?

Google now offers a new set of reports specifically designed to gauge the effectiveness of social marketing. These four reports allow you to analyze the big picture and the details of what’s going on as a result of your social marketing initiatives. By delving into the information they contain you should be able to grasp the trends and tweak the minutiae. The elements that play into analyzing the impact of your social media marketing are:

Sources. You can analyze the relative robustness of your social media presence site by site by comparing traffic referral numbers. Here are your metrics for assessing duration of visit, numbers of pages viewed and pageviews by source. You can also view useful data like page shares and conversations about your brand by clicking on Activity Stream. This includes information from social network hub partners, so you can see your activity on all kinds of non-Google sites.

Pages. This report shows the metrics categorized by URL, so you can see which of your pages get the best response and adjust others accordingly.  Through Activity Stream you can see what of your content is being shared, where it’s happening and the ways it’s being shared. Off-site data is available here too. Just click on a network to see the display of activity information.

Social Plug-ins. This report is useful for finding which buttons on your page people use for sharing content as well as which content goes where. It’s extremely useful feedback for tailoring the content you produce and the buttons you choose to include. Why clutter up the page with buttons your reading audience never uses?

Social Visitors Flow. This report is really a map that traces the route site visitors take on their journey from a social media page to your site and through it. It can be particularly helpful for gauging the ease with which visitors use your site. Do they cast about helplessly in a quest for hidden information or do they make straight lines to the places you’d like them to go? Does your targeted campaign pay off in general site exploration or lead to in-and-out visits? Does visitor behavior vary by source? The answers to these and many other worthwhile mysteries are revealed through careful study of this report.

There is an additional report available to those who have set up numeric goals for visitor conversions. It’s called Conversions, and if you have have it loaded with numbers you can actually quantify the effect of your social media presence on your firm’s bottom line. It shows the number and dollar value of conversions that came immediately and those that followed more visits to learn about the company. If this is beyond your interest level and time parameters, skip it. You can gain a wealth of actionable data and see the patterns that let you know what’s working in the other reports.

All this may seem as appealing as leftover leftovers, but it really offers you a powerful set of data to work with. Spend a little time with the Goog to get comfortable, then dive into a data set that lets you see where you stand and why the whole social thing is worth it. You won’t be disappointed.