Last week we discussed that Google Favors Social Sharing over SEO. Google now puts more emphasis on social sharing: likes, tweets, and shares, considering it as an endorsement of your brand. It’s now more important than ever to: write content that inspires people to share, and monitor your social media traffic using Google Analytics.
If you have a website then having Google Analytics is a must. View our Guide to Google Analytics. The value of who visits your site, where they are coming from and how long they stay engaged, can assist you in transforming thosem visits into customers, engaged users and followers.
There are millions of websites out there. Tracking how people are getting to your site and what‘s performing well is a must for being competitive in the online market. In this article, we will show you how to set up Tracking of your Social Media Traffic. By doing this you will be able to see at a glance where your visitors are coming from and where they are not. Allowing you to access and manage the success of your different social media sites. We recommend you make monitoring the health of your site with Google Analytics, part of your weekly regime.
The one particular tool I want to setup is the feature called Advanced Segments which shows your social media traffic in individual segments and allowing you to compare traffic sources.
[ Advanced Segments allow you to isolate and analyze specific kinds of traffic. For example, you might create a segment that only includes visits from purchasers. You can then browse through your Analytics reports, viewing data only for this segment or even comparing it side by side with data from other segments or data from all visits. source: Google. ]
First things first, for this “How to Guide” we are going to assume that you already have a google account and are signed up for google analytics with the tracking code already installed on your website.
Hint: make sure that you are using the newest version of google. In the very top right hand corner, if you see:
New Version | youremail@address.boo | Setting | My Account | Sign out - click on the “new version” link.
For more information on setting up your Google account and using Goals check out our Slideshare Tutorial click here .
Now, let’s dive into the setup of an Advanced Segment. Sign in to your Google Analytics account, go to your website’s profile, under the account’s list in upper left hand side, (if you have more than one website, select the one you want).
Now you will see “My Dashboard” page with three tabs at the top: Home | Standard Reports | Custom Reporting
Select ” Standard Reports” Now lets view the traffic of your site. On the left hand side, select Traffic Sources, then sources, then all traffic. See where most of your sites social media traffic is coming from. You may have more visitors from your Facebook page if you have an active page or your YouTube channel maybe sending more traffic to your site, it will all depend on the profile/activity you have on that particular social media site. Once you see the procedure you will be able to follow on with your on Custom Segments for the traffic source of your choice.
I decided to setup Facebook, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn and YouTube Segments. Note: that you will only be able to view four custom segments per report.
From any Google Analytics report, click on Advanced Segments, then click “+ New Custom Segment”.
Now you will see the following:
Give your Custom Segment a name. Leave “Include” as the first option, then select “Source” from the second pull down menu, leave “Containing” in the third pulldown. In the fourth area is where you type in the term. For Facebook, you will notice that when you type facebook.com, google also shows you m.facbook.com (for visitors from it’s mobile site), that is an indication that you have traffic from that location, Google is inserting the filters using an auto-complete function.
After you have the first one entered, click on “Add “OR” statement” . Now select, “ metric “, and repeat the set for the other facebook site m.facbook.com
Once you have all the social sites added, click on the “Test Segment“ button.
Now you will see the traffic number for the segment you just setup, don’t forget to select “Save Segment” to save this segment.
To set up for Google + it’s simpler because Google only sends traffic from “plus.url.google.com” so you just have one filter to set up.
From this guide you can create segments for any social media site that sends you traffic. And you also create one segment that tracks multiply sources at once. Which may save you from setting 20 plus segments. Also since you can only view four segments at a time in the report this may come in handle for particular sites.
Here’s how: As before name your Custom Segment, we used “Social Media Reg”. Leave “Include” as the first option, then select “Source” from the second pull down menu, instead of “Containing” in the third pulldown change that to “Matching RegExp”. In the fourth area is where you type in the terms within brackets “( )” make sure you have no spaces, separate the terms with the vertical bar “|” as shown below.
ie: (twitter|facebook|m.facebook.com|plus.url.google|linkedin|youtube)
Matching RegExp – Matching Regular Expression creates only one condition which includes all the social media sites of your choice. This can be used to show how these social media visitors behave as a whole on your site. While the individual Segments are useful to compare which sources you get the most traffic from. For example we found that our visitors from Facebook and Slideshare stayed on our site for an average of 5-6minutes, while Twitter visitors bounced in and out!
So it seems that our weekly blogging and sharing of our blogs on Facebook, are driving our Facebook fans visit our site. 
This is GREAT news.
You can also view our Google Social Sharing Analytics tutorial, for more on this subject.
End Note: I wish to send a big thank-you to Eugen Oprea at Social Media Examiner whom wrote a great guide for tracking social media traffic which I used for a reference in writing this article.
Please let me know if my post has helped you. I would love to hear from you with a comment or any questions.
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[Blog by Chrissie ]
About Nancy Bain
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