How to Track Social Conversions with Google Analytics

One of the most frustrating aspects of social media marketing is trying to track its effectiveness. Even if you're constantly monitoring your social media channels, it can be hard to tell which campaigns are working, where your traffic is coming from, and how your social efforts impact sales.

You can make things easier by using Google Analytics to track your social conversions. In 2012, Google added social reporting tools to its powerful free analytics suite, giving marketers access to social media monitoring and measuring capabilities in a centralized location.

Here's how you can use Social Reports from Google to keep track of your social media campaigns and optimize your results.

View website traffic with Social Visitors Flow

Wondering which social platforms are the best for sending traffic to your website? This tool shows you at a glance. Social Visitors Flow offers a visual presentation of where visitors came to your site from, arranged top-down with the most popular inbound link at the top. The number of visitors per site is also shown clearly.

In addition, Social Visitors Flow shows you how visitors navigate your website once they get there. The chart outlines visitor paths through your pages, and tells you whether they exited the site after clicking through, or spent some time looking around. The drop-off rate is provided at the top of the chart in number form, as visits versus drop-offs.

With Social Visitors Flow, you can see right away which social platforms are responsible for the most traffic to your website--and which ones are providing more quality leads.

Track conversions through social traffic with Social Value At-a-Glance

The Social Overview report on Google Analytics offers a simple chart that shows "Social Value." This customizable feature lets you determine how conversions or events are happening on your website through social traffic.

To optimize your Social Overview report, you'll need to set up Goals for your activity. You can track obvious conversions like subscription form completion or online purchases, or get specific with micro-conversions like blog or video views.

Goals can be defined based on several factors, including:

• URL destination for the page a visitor lands on
• Visit duration using a specified amount of time
• Pages visited (number of pages)
• Events based on user actions (downloads, video views, click-throughs)

You can also define monetary values for your Goals, so you can assign social values to each of your channels.

Find out which social channels assist with the most conversions

The Multi-Channel Funnel Report is another useful visual presentation that shows you which social media platforms are delivering assisted conversions to your website. The Google definition of assisted conversion is:

"The number (and monetary value) of sales and conversions the social network assisted. An assist occurs when someone visits your site, leaves without converting, but returns later to convert during a subsequent visit. The higher these numbers, the more important the assist role of the social network."

With the Multi-Channel Funnel Report, you can see right away which of your social media channels is contributing the most to actual sales conversions. You can also customize the eight basic channel groupings in this report and get more detailed analytics by creating separate groupings for individual social networks, and more.

Google Analytics delivers valuable data that can help you fine-tune your social media marketing strategy, and refocus your efforts to the channels that matter most for your business. If you are looking for marketing jobs in Houston TX, contact Clearpoint today.

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