Using Google Analytics In Social Media

In a recent interview Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner did with Avinash Kaushik, the digital marketing evangelist for Google and author of Web Analytics 2.0., Avinash shared how the free enterprise-class tools available through Google Analytics affects businesses today. He explained how your social media activity influences the behavior of your business audience to help you improve your results.

Think about 3 buckets:

Acquisition – It provides details about where people are coming to your site from. Was it from SEO you’ve implemented, from your Twitter, etc.

Behavior on your site - Bounce rate, the percentage of people who somehow landed on your site, but went (clicked) no further. It’s pretty valuable information, as it can help you identify weaknesses at the floor level of your site. From seeing what pages they’re landing on and immediately leaving, it may suggest broken links or landing pages, or campaigns/content that may not be enticing enough to make them WANT to go further.

Conversion or outcome for you – This is where Google Analytics goes deeper. Did they land, click on an e-report to be sent to them, and thus become a lead? Did they leave a comment on your blog thus adding value to your site as well as to SEO and the conversation? You can measure the number of people who follow you on Twitter, who sign up for your RSS feed, who come back repeatedly, etc.

Google Analytics can also help you understand your social media results, particularly when used in your business branding and marketing. Not only do you want to know when your Tweets or Facebook posts, etc. cause activity and engagement, but most important, what was the value of that activity? Did that activity drive more website visitors, more website engagement, more prospects? Knowing these things, by Google Analytics measurement, quantifies your social media efforts. This enables you to compare the value of your social media efforts against that of other avenues, i.e. display ads, SEO, etc.

One of the things you can easily do in Google Analytics is to create and track what they refer to as advanced segments. This could be your Twitter segment, another for Facebook, another for YouTube, etc. It takes you literally about 3 seconds to create a segment, then once created, all the same stats and details you can find out with Google Analytics, are than drilled down to specific segments. You can than compare the value you’re getting from one segment to another, and make adjustments of time invested based on that. If you’re getting say 23% more comments on your Tweets than your are on your Facebook posts, might knowing that direct where you apply the larger percentage of your social media effort and time? Super valuable information!

In terms of which metrics of social media provide the greatest value to you, while it’s great to know how many Facebook followers you have, how many Tweets you’ve been mentioned in, etc, it’s of more value to you to move beyond those basic numbers. For example, with your Twitter segment, look at the number of re-Tweets. Think about it like this, each of your Tweets is like a drop in a lake. What matters more than the number of Tweets you’ve made, is the wave caused by that drop; is it a big wave or a small wave? If your Tweets provide value to your followers, they validate that by re-Tweeting, and now that value goes out to others who aren’t perhaps already following you or even know who you are. You’ve just been introduced to perhaps countless other prospects!

The follower re-Tweet percentage is also important to measure and look at. Is it just your Mom and Dad re-Tweeting your brilliance, or is it a growing number of followers that you have? If you analyze these metrics, it enables you better know who the people are who follow your Twitter account, what are their needs, what do they respond to?

Another important metric to look at is conversation rate; on Twitter this would specifically be the number of replies you sent each day, and the number of replies received each day. Basically, it’s measuring more one-on-one or one-on-few conversations. Social media is not a medium where simply shouting creates value. The real value comes when that “connection” is made by people with your brand. THAT is the real gift of social media.

To learn more about Google Analytics in social media, you can follow Avinash on Twitter, @avinash, or go to http://www.google.com/analytics.