Do you know your top performing social networks? You do now with this complete guide to using Google Analytics for Social Media ROI!
One of the hardest things to measure for most people 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, and how well.
Well at Warfare Plugins we’ve set out to at least make it a little bit easier to track your Social Media ROI through Google Analytics with a custom Google Analytics Dashboard.
To frame this a bit more for you– we’ll be looking at how to track which social networks are performing best for your website or blog. In order to do this you will need at least two things:
- A website or blog (obviously)
- Google Analytics activated on that website or blog
If you have both of those things ready to go, let’s get started…
Getting Started with Google Analytics
In order to track your return on investment for Social Media, you should first familiarize yourself with some basic Google Analytics features.
The specific features I’ll be talking about in this article are:
- Goals: the most important of metrics— also referred to as conversions. These are the actions that drive your business.
- UTM Tracking: a way of tracking links shared on social media.
- Dashboards: a customizable snapshot of your most important metrics. This is where we measure everything that is important to us.
Now let’s break each of these down one-by-one.
Setting Up Goals and Conversions
Goals can be set up in Google analytics to track nearly any website objective or conversion that is considered by you to be a “win”. This can include newsletter sign-ups, contact form submissions, or product sales.
The easiest way to set this up is to create what’s called a destination goal. This is a goal that will track every time a certain page on your site is reached— a “Thank You” page for example.
How to set up a destination goal
For this example we will be creating a typical destination goal. We’re going to attempt to track every time someone signs up for our email newsletter.
First you’ll need to open up Google Analytics and navigate to your account. Then follow this process:
- Click on the Admin tab at the top of the page
- Click on the Goals tab in the 3rd column
- Click the red “+New Goal” button
Now we can begin setting up this goal.
Step 1 is to select the Custom option as opposed to one of the provided templates.
After selecting the Custom option, click the blue Continue button.
Now you’ll need to give your goal a Name. Keep it simple— we’re just going to use Signup for this example.
You could choose to make it super specific if you plan on making multiple goals and having a way to track each goal individually. But for now, let’s just stick with simple.
Once you’ve added the Name you now need to select they Type of goal, and as I’ve already said, this will be a Destination goal. Once you’ve selected that option, click the Continue button.
Now on the final step you simply need to add in the URL of your “Thank You” page that people are sent to once they sign up. This is assuming that you’ve set up a redirect to send them to this page when they submit the signup form.
Next to the Equals to box, enter your Thank You page URL and you’re finished.
You have the option to assign a monetary value to these goals if you like. What that will do is add up a dollar amount for each time this goal is reached so you can track revenue.
I generally set an email subscriber to a $1 value, just because it gives me something to start with.
In the spirit of keeping things super simple, we’re going to just ignore the Funnel option.
UTM Tracking
If you’re not familiar with what UTM tracking is, I wanted to give you a brief overview. This is one of the features we’ve built into our flagship product, Social Warfare and plays a vital role of how we monitor how social sharing is affecting our own inbound traffic.
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 > 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 > 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 typically these are the primary ones.
Now, Google Analytics can often track inbound traffic from social networks without UTM tracking, this just gives you more intelligent control over the tracking so you can dig deeper.
If you want a more in-depth view of UTM tracking, Jeffrey Kranz has written a complete guide to UTM codes over on the Buffer blog. I highly recommend it.
Additionally, +David Kutcher is pretty much my go-to expert when it comes to Google Analytics. If you’re on Google+, he’s a must-circle.
Google Analytics Dashboards
A Google Analytics Dashboard is a way to instantly see a snapshot of your site’s most important metrics. You can customize and create as many dashboards as you need.
Each dashboard is allowed up to 12 widgets, each containing a specific set of information that you want. So instead of having to dig through the various sections of Google Analytics and find the report you’re looking for, you can have them already populated in your dashboard for quick viewing.
Setting Up A Dashboard
Now, if you don’t want to take the time to set up your own custom dashboard, we’ll send you our one-click Google Analytics Dashboard Template. Just add your name and email below and we’ll send you the link right away!
For those of you who want a step-by-step walkthrough, here you go.
Click on the Dashboard tab on the right sidebar in Google Analytics. It will then drop some more items, one of which is +New Dashboard. Click that one.
You’ll be given the option to start with a Blank Canvas or a Starter Dashboard. Select the blank option and name your dashboard Social Media.
Once you’ve done that you will automatically be prompted to create a new widget. There are different types of widgets you can choose from that will display different sets of data in different ways.
Here are the widgets we’re going to create:
- Social Traffic Sessions
- Social Traffic Time on Site
- Social Traffic Pages per Visit
- Social Traffic Popular Content
- Social Traffic Campaigns and Conversions
- Social Traffic by Network (Pie Chart)
- Social Traffic Conversions by Network (Pie Chart)
- Social Traffic & Conversions (Table)
With these eight widgets you should be able to effectively measure how each social network is performing for your site.
Social Traffic Sessions
This widget will show you the total number of sessions (visits) that were brought in through social media. This could be from people clicking on shared links or links in your social profile bios.
To create this widget select Metric under the Standard list under Show the following metric search for and select Sessions.
Now you’ll want to create a filter that will ensure that the only sessions that are counted are sessions that came from a social network. To do this click Add a filter and use the following settings:
Only show / Dimension = Social Source Referral / Containing / Yes
It should look like this:
Social Traffic Time on Site
This widget allows you to see how long, on average, your visitors from social media are staying on your site.
Click +Add Widget and select the standard Metric type and under Show the following metric search for and select Avg. Session Duration.
The filter you’ll add is the same:
Only show / Dimension = Social Source Referral / Containing / Yes
It should look like this:
Social Traffic Pages per Visit
This metric will tell you how many pages, on average, a visitor views before leaving your site.
Since you’re probably getting the hang of this by now, here’s what this one should look like:
Social Traffic Popular Content
This widget will identify the blog posts that brought in the most social traffic and the average amount of time people spent on those posts.
For this widget you’ll select the standard Table type and under Display the following columns you’ll choose:
Page Title / Sessions / Avg. Time on Page
Select the option to Show a table with: 10 rows
You will then add the same filter as in previous examples.
Here’s what it will end up looking like:
Social Traffic Campaigns and Conversions
Now, remember when we talked about UTM tracking? This is where that comes into play.
If you are using UTM tracking in your links, this is where you can see how those campaigns are performing. This widget will display the top campaigns ordered by most sessions and give you the number of goal completions from each campaign.
For this widget you’ll select the standard Table type and under Display the following columns you’ll select:
Campaign / Sessions / Goal Completions
Select the option to Show a table with: 10 rows
You will be using two filters on this data set:
Don’t show / Campaign / Containing / (not set)
Only show / Social Source Referral / Containing / Yes
And here’s what the end product will look like:
Social Traffic by Network (Pie Chart)
This widget will create a pie chart so you can easily see what share of social traffic each network is sending to your site.
Select the standard Pie type and under Create a pie chart showing select Sessions. Under Grouped by select Social Network.
You can decide how many slices you want to show and whether or not you want it to be a donut chart. I always select the maximum number of slices (6) and I love donuts, so my pie charts are donuts too.
Your filter will be:
Only show / Social Source Referral / Containing / Yes
And the should look like this:
Social Traffic Conversions by Network (Pie Chart)
This pie chart will give you an at-a-glance look at what percentage of your total social traffic conversions are coming from each network.
For this widget select the Pie type and under Create a pie chart showing you will select Goal Completions grouped by Social Network.
Same filter as above.
Here’s what it should look like:
Social Traffic and Conversions (Table)
Finally, this last widget will show a table of which social networks are driving the most session and what the average conversion rate is. Essentially it’s a combination of the previous two pie charts.
For this widget select the standard table type with the following columns:
Social Network / Sessions / Goal Conversion Rate
Choose the number of rows you want to show (I chose 10) and then set a filter for:
Only show / Social Source Referral / Containing / Yes
It will look like this:
Bonus: Social Warfare Specific Widgets
For those of you who use Social Warfare on your blog you could also add some extra widgets to track specifically how the links being shared through the plugin are performing. This way, you can truly see how well Social Warfare is working for you.
Firstly, you’ll need to have Analytics Tracking set to On in your settings.
Notice how we’ve set the default campaign text is set to SocialWarfare. This will automatically be inserted in the UTM parameter for utmcampaign= so that Google Analytics can properly track the inbound traffic from those specific links.
This way, you can create any of the same widgets that you’re already monitoring but add an additional filter like this one:
Only show / Campaign / Containing / SocialWarfare
So if you want to know exactly how much of your social traffic Social Warfare is driving to your site, use this widget setup:
Or if you wanted to know which content was performing best as shared thorugh Social Warfare, you would use this setup:
Or lastly, if you wanted to see which social networks were performing best by traffic sessions and conversion rate with Social Warfare shares, you could use this setup:
Again, all of this is packaged up for you in our Google Analytics Dashboard template which we’ll send to you right away when you subscribe below.
You have the data, now what?
Now that you’ve got your dashboard in place and all the data is right there before your eyes— what are you looking for?
Well if you’re like me then you want to be putting the right effort in the right places. So that means you’ll want to find where you’re getting the highest quality traffic— or in other words, which sources are converting the best.
The catch is you don’t want to only look at where your most traffic and conversions are coming from, you also want to look at the conversion rate. For me, I like to identify:
- Top 3 traffic sources by number of sessions
- Top 3 conversion sources by number of conversions
- Top 3 conversion sources by conversion rate
If you’ve set up your dashboard like we’ve gone through above, you can easily identify all of your most effective social networks and decide where you place your efforts moving forward.
But understand that this is still only part of the story. The data can only tell you so much about what’s working. The question of why it’s working is something you will need to constantly evaluate and test.
That’s why being able to customize how your content is being shared is so important. If you can understand what is working and why it’s working, you can tailor your shared content through Social Warfare so that when people share your content, you know it will be the most effective share possible and drive better results.
And that’s what we care about most— your results.
So let us know how it’s working! If you’ve found this post helpful, share your thoughts in the comments and share the post with your networks!
I truly appreciate this post. I ave been looking everywhere for this! Thank goodness I found it on Bing. You have made my day! Thank you again..
Thanks very much for a great post. I just set up my dashboard and am very happy.
Hi, I registered with two different email addresses but never received the dashboard (or a confirmation email) on either of them. Does that signup form still work?
Hi Holger! I just tried it again myself and it’s working perfectly. Did you check your spam/junk folders perchance?
I did – always the first thing I check. I guess I’ll try again and monitor the server log…
And mystery solved – your mailing service sends with a sender address @bounce.warfareplugins.com – but that subdomain (bounce) doesn’t exist, causing many mail servers to reject the message because it can’t be coming from a nonexistent sender…
You will probably want to fix that.
I’ll definitely look into that Holger. Not sure why it’s sending with that address.
Great post Dustin, it’d be great to dig into this a bit deeper and explore setting up social micro-conversions in GA and connecting them to full (ROI driving) conversions.
Measuring ROI in non-financial factor is a good approach. This is the convincing answer to all clients and top management. This article made me follow you on twitter & retweeted this to my audience. https://twitter.com/venkatweetz/status/882106720830476288
Hey,
Thank you! That’s awesome! Can we do the same thing with GA User ID? This way you’d know exactly the LTV of a customer that comes from a specific channel. I’ve been dreaming of this.
Any change to differentiate traffic that comes for your Facebook page or Facebook group?
Thank you!
Hi Laura! I’m afraid that is well beyond my knowledge of Google Analytics. The good news though is that our Developer Documentation is getting better and if you may be able to have a developer build this out as an add-on.
Where do I find the total social shares in analytics? On my wordpress site in the posts section, I see the total shares for each post. I’m looking for the total shares of all the posts together.
Hi Anne! Currently there is no way to do this. However, we are working on a new set of shortcodes (and a dashboard) that would allow for you to do this easily.
Thanks for the template Dustin! It was the start to building out my own.
One question. The “Social Traffic Conversions by Network” figures in this dashboard don’t match up with the numbers in Google Analytics’ pre-configured “Social > Conversions” report.
Any idea?
I would have to look at how each widget is configured in order to see why they’re coming up with different numbers.
This is very informative, let me try it out.
adding UTM won’t that affect counters?
Kingsley, Nah. It won’t affect them. The moment a link is shared on a social network, prior to counting that link towards the share count of any particular URL, it checks that URL for 301 redirects, rel canonical, open graph URLs, and possibly even a couple other things. Our plugin populates the Open Graph URL such that a link like domain.com/blog-post?utm=blahblah will simply count towards domain.com/blog-post. Does that make sense?
Informative post Dustin. Measuring the ROI is really important part of any sort of Digital Marketing channels and when it comes to the paid marketing, the ROI becomes more crucial. Thanks for sharing this post and tips.
You’re very welcome Sonia!
Thanks for great info. I got the dashboard up and running and its really nice to get the info.
I have a question. Im not sure how this are working, but is it possible to see the result of the shares?
If somone share my post with social warfare – facebook to theyr own facebook page. Then there are several possibilities:
1) people can like post
2) people can share the post
3) people can visit my post
3) people can share my post
What info will i get?
Also, i share on my own website, will this be part of it?
Thanks 🙂
Hi Knut! These are great questions and I’m glad you’re enjoying the dashboard. If I understand your primary question correctly, you will not be able to see the actions taken on social posts within Google Analytics. What you will see reflected in Google Analytics are:
1. Number of clicks on your social warfare buttons (via Event Tracking)
2. Number of visitors/pageviews/etc that are a result of shares from Social Warfare (via source/medium or Campaigns).
All the social actions taken on the social posts themselves (ie. Likes, shares, favorites, retweets, etc) are recorded by the social networks and Google Analytics doesn’t have access to that data.
What happens if you use your plugin with Buffer as I know Buffer appends UTM trackers as well? Does one over-ride the other or will you get a concatenated chain of UTM trackers?
Great question Debbie! Using our Buffer button will automatically insert the UTM tracking from our plugin which will then cause Buffer to not add its own UTM.
None of the social warfare info is pulling into my GA. It is showing one popular post and one tweet. I just got social warfare set up last weekend. Does it take a while to pull the data. I have even played with settings this evening to see if I had something turned off. Thank!
Hi Brandi! Looks like this might be the kind of conversation that is best facilitated through our support system.
The first place I’d check though would be in Social Warfare > Analytics to make sure that you have the UTM tracking turned ON. If they are, and you’re still not able to use this post as a guide to finding the Social Warfare data, we can definitely help you through it via our support system.
Thanks Dustin! Got a support ticket submitted.
Dustin, This is awesome addition to Warfare! Thanks so much.
You’re welcome Zara!
Thanks Dustin. Very helpful
You’re welcome Lance!
Dustin, you are the F’n man. That is all. Wait, no, that is not all. I love that you guys are holding the product accountable by showing people exactly how to see what they are getting for their money.
Hey Team – LOVE this tutorial — many many thanks for creating it.
I have one question – every place you say to put “Sessions” there is not a type just called “Sessions” it’s always something like “Session with an Event” or “Sessions with Search” There is never just “Sessions.” Will it work if I’ve used “Sessions with Event?” If not, what to do?
nevermind 🙂
Glad you found it Phyllis! Did you end up using the template I provided?