One of the hardest things for most people to measure is the ROI (return on investment) of social media. For bloggers, business owners, and digital marketers it can be frustrating to try and determine what is actually working. That’s why Warfare Plugins has set out to make it a little bit easier for you to track your Social Media ROI through Google Analytics with a custom Google Analytics 4 Dashboard.
Social Warfare has already been updated to work with GA4, meaning all of the data that flows in through your custom social share buttons will be easily accessible.
How? Well, Social Warfare gives you the option to automatically add UTM tracking strings to every shared URL that goes out from the plugin. This allows you to track how Social Warfare is driving traffic through Google Analytics.
If you’re not familiar with what UTM tracking is, we’ve got a brief overview for you.
UTM Tracking
If you’ve ever looked at a URL and noticed that it had something like this on the end:
?utm_source=SOMETHING&utm_medium=SOMETHINGELSE&utm_campaign=ANOTHERTHING
That’s what is known as a UTM string. It’s a string of code added to the end of a URL that allows Google Analytics to understand a number of things about how someone got to the page with that particular URL.
Here’s what this bit of code would be telling Google Analytics:
- utm_source=SOMETHING: This is the source of where the link was generated/shared and can be found in GA under Acquisition > All Traffic >Source/Medium. The word SOMETHING would be substituted with the appropriate source.
- utm_medium=SOMETHINGELSE: This is the medium over in which the link was shared/clicked and can be found in GA under Acquisition > All Traffic >Source/Medium also. The word SOMETHINGELSE would be substituted with the appropriate medium.
- utm_campaign=ANOTHERTHING: This is the name of the campaign in which this link was a part of and can be found in GA under Acquisition > Campaigns. The word ANOTHERTHING would be substituted with the campaign name.
There are other UTM parameters that can be added, but these are the primary ones.
Google Analytics can sometimes track inbound traffic from social networks without UTM tracking, but these parameters give you more intelligent control over the tracking so you can dig deeper. Since Social Warfare lets you automatically add these UTM strings to your social share buttons, this means you get top-tier insights into every person that clicks on them.
Both button click tracking and UTM link tracking are extraordinarily helpful tools for gaining insights about your visitors’ sharing behavior in Google Analytics 4. GA4 isn’t just a trend, but the new and necessary way to track your analytics. Take advantage of it alongside Social Warfare and get the best of both worlds – sharing and tracking!
