Semalt: How To Track Social Media Traffic With Google Analytics?

Google Analytics allows us to see where the traffic comes from and how to engage the visitors with high-quality content. Additionally, we can quickly set up the goals that match our business needs and can measure if the visitors meet our goals. With Google Analytics, it's very easy to get valuable insights about your readers. It also helps you identify and evaluate the social media traffic. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and LinkedIn are the most famous social media sites that send various visitors to your site, and you can track them through your Google Analytics account.

Here Ross Barber, a top professional from Semalt, will teach you how to use the Advanced Segments for segmenting the social media traffic. You can also observe the behavior of your visitors on your website.

Getting Started with Google Analytics:

Before you dive into it, you should make sure that you are using the new version of Google Analytics. For this, you just need to log in to your account and click on the New Version option on the top left side.

Step#1: Identify the Traffic Sources:

The first step is to identify which social media sites are sending the most traffic to your site. For this, you should go to the Traffic Sources option and choose All Traffic.

Step#2: Create an Advanced Segment:

Once you have properly identified the traffic sources, the next step is to create the Advanced Segments for those sites so that you can divide the traffic into different categories. Alternatively, you can set up different segments and can compare them to evaluate the difference.

Step#3: Twitter Traffic Segments:

It's possible to create advanced segments for your Twitter account to check how it compares with other social media sites. For this, you should click on the Advanced Segments option in your Google Analytics account and create a New Custom Segment. Then, you should give a proper name to this segment and include twitter.com, TweetDeck, HootSuite, bit.ly, and t.co to it.

Step#4: Facebook Traffic Segments:

You can also create the Facebook traffic segments, which are created exactly as you did for your Twitter account – you just need to change the filter names to facebook.com and m.facebook.com.

Step#5: Google+ Traffic Segments:

You can easily create the Google+ traffic segments just like you created the Facebook and Twitter segments. All you need to do is name your filter as plus.url.google.com. It's safe to say that Google+ sends most of the traffic from the plus.url.google.com link. You will also see some visitors from the Google.com URL, but there is no need to include it in the Filters' section.

Social Media Traffic:

Now you know how to create different segments, it's easy to create segments for all other social media sites too. You are free to use multiple segments and include visitors coming from StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

For instance, below are the websites you may want to include in the segments with the OR statement:

1. t.co

2. Twitter.com

3. HootSuite

4. Bit.ly

5. TweetDeck

6. Facebook.com

7. plus.url.google.com

8. m.facebook.com

9. LinkedIn

10. Reddit

These are just a few examples, but you can create multiple segments for different social networking sites based on your requirements.