Drive Traffic to Your Website with Social Media

What’s going on with your website traffic?

Have you ever wondered why you’re not seeing any website traffic from all those posts you’re scheduling on social media? Did you just shake your head or did you do a little digging into what’s going on?

If you’re ready to move past just wondering what happened into KNOWING what happened than today’s post has got you written all over it!

It’s Google Analytics time

I get it.

Google Analytics can be confusing with all those charts and graphs and numbers. But if you want to understand how to connect with your customers, this is the best place to help you track what’s working and what’s not.

Before I get started – is your site even connected to Google Analytics? Most programmers and web designers will set up your site to the Google Analytics monitors. The program is FREE and it usually takes a programmer { or if you understand how to program your own site! } less than 30 minutes to hook up the program by adding some coding into your site.

For those of you who do NOT have Google Analytics tracking your site, take a look at this post to give you the steps for you or your programmer to install Google Analytics: How to Install Google Analytics

Once you’re set up and ready to go, log into the program and click around to get familiar with all the parts of your website that the program is tracking.

Let’s take a look where your website traffic is coming from

1. In the right hand corner of the program, change the dates for the full month you’re running the report on and hit apply. The program will now pull up the data for the month.

2. Then click on the following sequence: Acquisitions – All Traffic – Referrals

In this section, you’ll see a list of all the sites that sends traffic to your site. Hopefully, most of these sites will be social media programs but if not, you know you’ve got some work to do as all those social posts aren’t connecting anyone to your website.

My top referral source is Pinterest.

Within this section, I can click on the Pinterest link and it takes me to a breakout of the top pins/images that brought people to my site. I usually make notes in my tracking chart about my top 10 pins and the number of traffic clicks from those images to my tracking chart.

I can also track my traffic from Twitter, my newsletter and all the places where I do guest blog posts.

At this time, we’re not able to view the specific links in Facebook so if Facebook is your top referral site, you may want to set up custom links like something with bit.ly so that you can track which Facebook links are directing traffic to your site.

Want to dig a little deeper?

Let’s take a look at your content and what’s bringing people to your site. Use this sequence: Behavior – Site content – All Pages

This information will give you a good overview of what type of content people are clicking on and want to read/review/purchase on your site.

If the top content page is a blog post, can you write more about that topic? If it’s a product page, can you run a specific sale on that product to get more people to your site? Think about how you can expand on these content pages and give visitors a new reason to come back.

Time to pull it all together

Now I want you to do some brainstorming about your customers and the information that you just discovered from your Google Analytics:

• Think about who your customer is and who you want to reach as future customers.
• Now spend a few minutes writing out which social sites you’ve connected with your customers – was it in a Facebook group or on Pinterest?
• Finally, take a look at the real numbers you found in your Google Analytics review and the information you discovered about what social site is bringing your website traffic and what content has connected with them to click a link.

Take a look at all that customer information and ask yourself, “Is this whole picture connected or does it look like a jigsaw puzzle that just got dumped out of the box?”

Now I want you to work through your social media marketing equation:

Demographics of your customer + what social site are YOU spending your time + what social site is YOUR CUSTOMER spending their time = your answer about how to drive traffic to your website with social media

Think about it like this – let’s say that your customer is a 40 year old mom, you spend most of your time in your Facebook groups and your Google Analytics shows that most of your site traffic is coming from Pinterest.

This is would be your social media marketing equation:

Customer is 40 year old Mom + Spending most of my Time in Facebook groups + My Customers are Finding me on Pinterest = Wasting My Time and Getting No WebSite Traffic

When you pull together your marketing equation, you can easily see where the disconnect is and why you’re not bringing any traffic to your website.

Now you’re probably asking, “That’s great information about my customers and Google Analytics, but how do I get more website traffic?”

Let me introduce you to the Social Biz Builder process!

This is just one of the lessons you’ll learn more about when you sign up for the Social Biz Builder program. With this 5-step marketing process, I’ll share with you the steps I take my clients through to help them drill down through all these social sites so they can start building their social media strategy to get more site traffic AND make more sales.

Step 1: Identify your target audience – Who are you trying to reach with your products and services?

You’ll work through some exercises to define who your typical customer is as well as the new customers you’re looking to connect with.

Step 2: Take a look at where your customers spend time online.

You’ll learn how to spend some time reading and listening in your customers top social media networks. What types of posts make them comment or hit the LIKE button? Is there a common theme to their comments?

Step 3: Define your targeted marketing message.

Once you figure out who they are and where they are spending their time, you’ll develop the message you can use about your products and services get more people to click over to your website.

Step 4: Develop the foundation of your social media plan.

Now that you’ve identified who your customers are and what social site they’re logging into every day, it’s time to pull all this targeted customer information together to create a strong foundation for a successful social marketing plan.

Step 5: Implement your social media marketing strategy.

Having a social plan doesn’t help you drive site traffic or make any sales if you don’t implement your social plans! The last step will help you learn a process you can easily reproduce into your social marketing plan every month.

Whether you just started your business or launched your site a few years ago, I’ll help you find your focus to stop wasting your time online – and find the right customers who are looking for what you’re selling.