Are You Tracking Your Social Sites?
I get it. Google Analytics can be confusing with all those charts and graphs and numbers. But if you want to grow your social presence, 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 (one of my favorite words!) and it usually takes a programmer 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 the program and all the parts of your website that we’ll be tracking.
An Overview of the Changes
If you are consistently running a monthly or quarterly Google Analytics reports, let me be the first to give you two thumbs up. You’re already one step closer to learning more about what’s going on with your website.
If you’re in the Google Analytics site tracking your social stuff, you’ve probably noticed that things have changed a bit. Many of the things you should be tracking have moved and changed names.
So whether you’re consistently tracking your site stats or just realized you should be logging into Google Analytics every month, let me give you an overview of what’s new, what moved to another section and what completely changed.
To do the following checklist, get out a piece of paper, a word document or the FREE Monthly Tracking Worksheet I use every month. You’ll want to keep this information in one place so you can compare your numbers throughout the year.
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 – Channels
Write down your numbers for Organic Search and Social. Your organic search numbers will show the number of people who found your site when they were doing an online search and landed on your site.
Organic search does NOT include search results for any Google Adword paid campaigns that you ran. Those results can be found in the Google Adword campaign section.
For the purpose of this post, we’re going to focus on your organic results. Your organic traffic could have been from a blog post, something you were selling or maybe something on your home page that triggered your site to pop up in an online search list. We’ll discover these reasons later in our checklist.
Your social numbers will give you an overall view of how many people clicked into your site from your social media sites. We’ll get into more details about this section as well.
3. Check your keywords (how they found you in the organic search) by following this sequence: Acquisitions – Campaigns – Organic Keywords
This section shifted down into the Campaigns section. It’s a bit hidden in this area. It looks like this section is set up for people who have run paid Google Adword campaigns but if you click on the Organic Keywords, you’ll find your monthly keywords.
Keywords are the words that people type into a search to find your site. For most people, your number one keyword will be something called ‘not provided.’ For those who DO pay for Google Adword campaigns, you’ll be able to pull this information from your Adword reports. The rest of us can only review what’s listed and write them down in your tracking document.
4. Where is your web traffic coming from? Use this sequence: Acquisitions – All Traffic – Source/Medium
This section changed names to Source/Medium. It appears that the only difference between this section and the Referrals is that Source/Medium includes any organic traffic referrals like online searches.
Write down your top 10 traffic referral sites into your tracking report. You’ll see the term (direct) / (none) listed as one of your traffic referrals.
From the word choice, it looks like nothing is being tracked to your site. But really it means that this line of referral is from direct traffic. These are the visitors who can came to your site directly and typed in your site’s URL into their browser.
5. How many new people have found you and how many are those that have discovered you already. Use this sequence: Audience – Behavior – New vs Returning
This is a great section to see how many new people come to your site and then how many come back. Write down the total number of New and Returning in your recap report as well as the information about how many pages they visited and how long they stayed on your site.
This information can help you tell if your content is valuable to your visitors. Do they stay and read or leave right after they clicked in?
6. Next let’s take a look at your content and what’s bringing people to your site. Use this sequence: Behavior – Site content – All Pages
Write down the top 10 pages on your site and the number of page views. This will give you a good overview of what type of content people are reading 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.
This is also section where you’ll see your Page Views. Most of the reports are showing you a number for Sessions, not Page Views.
A Session is the period of time that a reader is actively engaged in your site. And Page Views are the total number of pages that are viewed on your site. I’d say that the biggest difference is that Sessions will help you understand how your readers are interacting with your site while Page Views show you what they’re clicking on to visit your site.
7. Let’s drill down deeper to your top referral source. To do this step, follow this sequence: Acquisitions – Referrals
To look at the specific referral links, you’ll need to click into the Referrals section, not the Source/Medium area.
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 add 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, Facebook, my newsletter and all the places where I do guest blog posts. So if those sites are your top referral, click on the name of the social site and then add in your notes about the name of the posts and the date posted that created that click-through.
How do we track all this social stuff?
I’ve lost track of the number of times I asked this question. I ran searches on Google and in Pinterest.
I found expensive programs that would run metric numbers for me, confusing spreadsheets and even a few companies I could hire to run my numbers every month.
I just couldn’t find what I was looking for so I made my own. Click here to download your FREE copy of my monthly tracking worksheet that you can use every month
Below are the details for your new tracking checklist. I’ve added in blank spaces for you to add your own important measurements like sales of a product that your company tracks every month.
The point of this is to start tracking your numbers so you can see a pattern of what’s working and what’s not.
1. First thing you’ll do is login into your Google Analytics account. In your monthly report, you’ll include the following:
- Page view numbers – social vs organic
- All traffic numbers – your top referral sites (how many clicks did you get to come to your site?)
- And then break down your top referral social site and dig a bit deeper into which content brought you the most traffic.
2. Next thing I do is track your organic keywords and top content pages:
- Which keywords are used for your top search numbers?
- What’s your top content for the month? (What are the top content pages on your site?)
- Add in notes about anything that happened that month – did you launch a new product or start selling a new service? What could have created a change in your social numbers?
3. The last step is to take a look at the big picture of all your numbers:
- Note which type of content is resonating with more people by the traffic it brings to your site.
- These numbers will tell you where to spend your valuable time. Can you expand on this content more or create a series of blog posts?
Tracking your social media marketing shouldn’t be about the number of fans that you have. It’s more about measuring your social activity and figuring out how to adjust your marketing strategy to reach the right people who will help you grow your business.
By constantly reviewing the behavior and the actions of your site visitors, you’ll start to get more details about how to refine your marketing plans. And the more specific your strategies can be, the better your chances are to convert your connections into loyal customers.
{ Click here to download your FREE copy of my monthly tracking worksheet that you can use every month! }
PS What if you could find a way to grow your presence in your social sites? And what if it didn’t add hours to your already crazy day? What if it took just 30 minutes a few times a week?
Click here to download the UPDATED 30 Minute Social Sessions workbook!
I’ve updated the workbook with all the latest changes for 2015. I’ll give you steps from the latest version of each social site’s features that you can do once or twice a week for 30 minutes to help you get your message heard by the people who want to buy your stuff.
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