Using Google Analytics to track Social Media

Not all traffic is equal, and the ability to segment and understand visitors helps us evaluate websites even better.

Advanced segments in Google Analytics is not new, and has been around since back in 2008, here’s a quick one similar to a setup I’ve used to jusify ROI on Social Networks.

Advanced Segments

Fire up Google Analytics and look for the Advanced Segments on the left hand side.

Create a new segment with the Source dimension and the Regular Expression condition.

Here’s what I’m using but you can easily add any social network you want into this pipe: twitter|technorati|wikipedia|stumbleupon|netvibes|bloglines|linkedin|facebook

Reporting on this segment allows you to analysis based on key metrics like bounce rate and time on site (both surprisingly good)

Intelligence

Reporting is one thing, but how about an alert – sent to you. While not real time, and perhaps not as good as BLVD Status – Google Analytics does allow you to setup some triggers. Here’s how…

Reuse the same pipe from above

Here I’m using a really basic visitor trigger, but you can use any available metric from Google Analytics, like revenue, bounce rates etc.

Google Analytics is extremely popular, but shiny reports and graphs are no replacement for knowing what data is actually useful. Setting up a few simple segments is a good what to understand what makes visitors tick.

Do you have any good Google Analytic tips? why not share them below.

Tweet