Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about your website’s traffic and traffic sources. The product is aimed at marketers to help them optimize their web site experiences and advertising strategies. Google Analytics is the most widely used website statistics service. The basic services is free, and a premium version is available for a fee.

Google Analytics tracks visits from site referrers such as search engines and social networks, as well as direct visits and referring websites.

Using Google Analytics to Measure Social Media Impact

Google Analytics provides hundreds of different metrics that you can use to report on various aspects of your website traffic. It’s not necessary to use every single metric. In the case of reporting on social media activity, the following metrics are the ones that matter most.

Audience Metrics
Rather than reporting on something like number of blog posts in a month or the size of your audience (based on unique visits), instead, report on the amount of change in these two metrics over time. For example, calculating the number of blog posts over a month, and the percentage of audience growth (i.e. unique visitors) can help you to see if an increase in frequency of blog posts has lead to an increase in your audience.

Engagement Metrics
Reporting how many people like a post is okay, but really, the most important numbers to focus on here are the ones that show you how you’re driving the action of “likes”. You can determine the conversation rate of your posts by dividing the number of post interactions by the audience (likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc) by the reach of each post. The posts with the highest conversation rate can guide future post topics tailored to what really resonates with your audience.

Social Network Metrics
It’s important to understand how your social media channels are driving traffic to your website. You can use Google Analytics to report on the number of social network visitors to your website. If you measure this over time, you can see how your social media activities are impacting your website traffic. For example, you could compare the rate of growth of your social networks to your website traffic and see if your social network activity is having a positive impact on driving visitors to your website.

Conversion Metrics
Google Analytics will tell you specifically how people are using your website — entry pages, exit pages, and the path people took through your site. By determining the specific actions you want people to take, you can then use analytics to track if they are converting as desired. For instance, if you are trying to encourage people to download an information kit, you could track whether people came from Facebook or Twitter to your info kit landing page, then whether they clicked on the download link, completed registration form information, and downloaded the document successfully.