*New* Social Tracking in Google Analytics
A few weeks ago I spoke about Tracking Tweets and Likes in Google Analytics. While checking one of my many Google Analytics accounts, I came across a new area within the Traffic Sources section called Social. As this hasn’t been mentioned on the official Analytics blog, this may be a beta feature Google are currently experimenting with, so it could disappear at any time. It seems purposed to provide insight into how social media is affecting visitor behaviour on your website.
Since this is a very recent rollout, it will be a few weeks before we can make any insightful analysis of these metrics but here’s a quick overview (with screenshots!).
The Social Relationship
Sources & Pages: Identify networks & communities where people engage with your content.
Conversions: Measure the value of social by tracking your goals, conversions and e-commerce transactions.
Social Plugins: Measure your on-site user engagement.
Social Visitors Flow: Compare traffic volumes and visitor traffic patterns through your site.
The below images have been re-sized to fit this blog post, but you can click on them to see them in full-size.
Social Overview
An overview of social media’s impact on your website. Pretty self-explanatory.
Social Sources
This is a fun one. It shows you the sources of your social traffic. In this case mainly Facebook and LinkedIn.
Social Pages
Here we can see which pages are generating social visits and possibly going viral through being shared.
Social Conversions
Another simple one. Here we can see all the socially generated conversions.
Social Plugins
This page shows us how people are interacting socially with your site. If you have a “Like us on Facebook”, or a “Tweet This” button on your site, this is where these interactions will be tracked (it looks like this only tracks Google Plus interactions by default, but we’ve shown you how to setup your own Like and Tweet tracking here).
Social Visitors Flow
This is exactly the same as the normal Visitor Flow report in Analytics, only segmented to show Social Traffic.
All in all, a pretty exciting change! I’ll be keeping a close eye on this in the coming weeks and I’ll post a follow-up once we have some concrete data. If you have any custom social tracking already then you should be seeing some data coming through for Facebook/Twitter and LinkedIn. If you’ve seen any anomalies in your data than let us know!
