{"id":2896,"date":"2012-12-10T08:52:18","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T08:52:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/?p=2896"},"modified":"2013-03-26T10:49:01","modified_gmt":"2013-03-26T10:49:01","slug":"3-actionable-steps-to-analyze-social-media-traffic-with-google-analytics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/3-actionable-steps-to-analyze-social-media-traffic-with-google-analytics\/","title":{"rendered":"3 Actionable Steps to Analyze Social Media Traffic with Google Analytics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-2904\" title=\"Analytics\" alt=\"Analytics\" src=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Analytics-580x350.jpg\" width=\"580\" height=\"350\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Analytics-580x350.jpg 580w, http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Analytics-495x300.jpg 495w, http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Analytics.jpg 661w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 580px) 100vw, 580px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Most likely you have already setup a Google analytics account in order to analyze your website\u2019s traffic.<\/p>\n<p>Today we will see together a step by step guide on how to identify, segment and analyze your social media traffic by utilizing the <strong>Google Analytics platform<\/strong>.<strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Identify your socia media traffic sources<\/h2>\n<p>The first step is to discover the social media sites that have sent the most traffic to your site during the last 30 days.<\/p>\n<p>To perform this action, go to <strong>Traffic Sources \u2013 Sources \u2013 Referrals<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2898\" title=\"Referrals\" alt=\"Referrals\" src=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Referrals.png\" width=\"231\" height=\"363\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Referrals.png 231w, http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Referrals-190x300.png 190w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 231px) 100vw, 231px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>On the right side of your screen you will find the full list of your referral sources.<\/p>\n<p>For our example site the top 3 referral sources are:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2899\" title=\"Referral Sources\" alt=\"Referral-Sources\" src=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Referral-Sources.png\" width=\"422\" height=\"125\" \/><\/p>\n<h2>Create advanced reports for your social media sources<\/h2>\n<p>In order to create your advanced reports you have two options.<\/p>\n<p>Create one advanced report for each social media source or create an aggregated advanced report for all your social media sources.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s see first how to <strong>create an advanced report<\/strong> for each of your social media sources.<\/p>\n<p>To perform this action, click the <strong>\u201cAdvanced Segments\u201d<\/strong> button and then click <strong>+ New Custom Segment<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-2900\" title=\"Advanced-segments-Referral-Traffic\" alt=\"Advanced-segments-Referral-Traffic\" src=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Advanced-segments-Referral-Traffic-580x228.png\" width=\"580\" height=\"228\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Advanced-segments-Referral-Traffic-580x228.png 580w, http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Advanced-segments-Referral-Traffic-500x196.png 500w, http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Advanced-segments-Referral-Traffic.png 1023w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 580px) 100vw, 580px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s create an advanced segment for <strong>Facebook<\/strong> social media traffic first.<\/p>\n<p>Add a name for your segment (we chose \u201cFacebook\u201d as a name) and include all \u201cfacebook\u201d sources that sent traffic your site. Specifically:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"text-align: left;\">facebook.com<\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: left;\">m.facebook.com<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Then click <strong>\u201cTest Segment\u201d<\/strong> to verify that the advanced report works properly and click <strong>\u201cSave Segment\u201d<\/strong>.<\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-2901\" title=\"Referral-Traffic\" alt=\"Referral-Traffic\" src=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Referral-Traffic-580x326.png\" width=\"580\" height=\"326\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Referral-Traffic-580x326.png 580w, http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Referral-Traffic-500x281.png 500w, http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Referral-Traffic.png 1020w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 580px) 100vw, 580px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>In the same way, you can create an advanced report for each of your social media traffic sources (e.g twitter, pinterest, google+, linkedin, etc).<\/p>\n<p>Now, in order to create an aggregated advanced report for all your social media sources you click again the<strong> \u201cAdvanced Segments\u201d<\/strong> button and then click <strong>+ New Custom Segment<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>The difference now is that we will create this segment by selecting a <strong>\u201cMatching RegExp\u201d<\/strong> as an option from the dropdown menu. Then we will add all social media traffic sources separated by a pipeline (|), just like the code below:<\/p>\n<div>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\" align=\"center\"><strong>facebook|t.co|plus.url.google|hootsuite|bit.ly|linkedin|youtube|delicious|stumbleupon<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\" align=\"center\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Note<\/span>: Make sure that there are no spaces between words or pipelines.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>You can also include other social media sites that send traffic to your website.<\/p>\n<p>Then click <strong>\u201cTest Segment\u201d<\/strong> to verify that the advanced report works properly and click <strong>\u201cSave Segment\u201d<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-2902\" title=\"Segment-Creation\" alt=\"Segment-Creation\" src=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Segment-Creation-580x350.png\" width=\"580\" height=\"350\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Segment-Creation-580x350.png 580w, http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Segment-Creation-496x300.png 496w, http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Segment-Creation.png 690w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 580px) 100vw, 580px\" \/><\/p>\n<h2>Analyze your social media traffic<\/h2>\n<p>Now that you have setup your advanced reports you are ready to analyze your social media traffic by whichever metric you want.<\/p>\n<p>For example, you can select one or more advanced reports from your list and compare them for specific metrics like Engagement, user location or what devices they have used to access your website.<\/p>\n<p>To do that, click the<strong> \u201cAdvanced Segments\u201d<\/strong> button, then choose one or more of your <strong>\u201cCustom Segments\u201d<\/strong> and click Apply.<\/p>\n<p>Now you are set to choose whichever metric you want (e.g Engagement) in order to analyze\/compare your social media sources.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-2903\" title=\"Advanced-segmentation\" alt=\"Advanced-segmentation\" src=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Advanced-segmentation-580x166.png\" width=\"580\" height=\"166\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Advanced-segmentation-580x166.png 580w, http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Advanced-segmentation-1024x294.png 1024w, http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Advanced-segmentation-1000x288.png 1000w, http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Advanced-segmentation-500x143.png 500w, http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Advanced-segmentation.png 1257w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 580px) 100vw, 580px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>So, log into your Google analytics account:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Identify your social media traffic sources<\/li>\n<li>Create your advanced reports<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u2026and start analyzing your social media traffic today!<\/p>\n<p>The more you get to know your visitors and the more you serve them, the more loyal they will become towards your website-brand.<\/p>\n<p>Apart from keeping a track of the performance of your social media activity via advanced segmentation, you can use the <a title=\"Reputation Tracker\" href=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/free\/seo-tools\/bookmarks-finder.php\" target=\"_blank\">Reputation Tracker<\/a> of Web SEO Analytics, according to which you are going to have more valuable insight of the social media presence of your website. It enables you\u00a0\u00a0to see the total number of shares, comments and mentions of your page on Facebook, on Twitter, on social bookmarking services (like StumbleUpon)<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most likely you have already setup a Google analytics account in order to analyze your website\u2019s traffic. Today we will see together a step by step guide on how to identify, segment and analyze your social media traffic by utilizing &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/3-actionable-steps-to-analyze-social-media-traffic-with-google-analytics\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,11],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2896"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2896"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2923,"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2896\/revisions\/2923"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}