Tracking Social MediaIf you are working hard to build traffic to your website, you will surely want to know more about the people who are visiting your website. Google Analytics helps you to know more about your visitors like who they actually are, where they come from, and how much they are engaged with your website. Google Analytics also helps in finding the social media sites that send more visitors to your website so that you can track your social media better. This article elucidates the steps to use Google Analytics for tracking your social media traffic.

Identify the Main Sources of Traffic
The first step in tracking your social media using Google Analytics involves discovering which social media are sending more traffic to your website. To know this basic information, go to the Traffic Sources section in Google Analytics and select Sources and All Traffic. Here you will be able to see the list of websites that are sending traffic back to your site. You might also be able to see which social media site isn’t giving your website traffic. And, if the site that doesn’t give you traffic right now is YouTube, (or any other social media of comparable caliber) then you can consider some of the best sites to buy YouTube likes. However, if you don’t want to invest in the aforementioned step, then you can think of keeping the first three or five sites from the list of websites already giving you traffic depending on your need and preference. Doing this would most likely increase your reach!

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Create Advanced Segments
After the main social media traffic sources are identified, you should proceed to create advanced segments for those websites and analyze the traffic to understand your visitors more personally. Click on the Advanced Segments option on any report of Google Analytics and select ‘click + New Custom Segment’. Add a name to your segment and include a source for the segment like twitter.com and facebook.com. Create segments for the important sites that you have considered in the previous step. Creating multiple advanced segments like this will help you in comparing them with each other and notice the difference.

Comprehensive Segment for Analysis of Social Media Traffic
After you have created individual segments the next step is creating a more inclusive separate segment that can analyze traffic from multiple social media outlets. Select ‘Matching RegExp as condition’ option in Google Analytics and type the social media sites that send traffic back to your site in the brackets “()” with each of the site separated by a vertical bar “|”.

Understanding Social Media Traffic
As you have created the required segments, the next step is to understand your social media traffic. The individual segments will help you in understanding how the individual sites compare to each other and the differences between them. This comprehensive segment will be helpful to understand how visitors from different social media sites interact with your site and their conversion rates. This segment will also help you to understand in which social media sites you should invest more time and other resources.

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Social Plugins
This section in Google Analytics gives information on the number of visitors to your website have used the social bookmarking buttons and the number of times each page is shared by them on social media sites. This content will help you in analyzing the type of content your visitors are sharing on social media. Google Analytics will show data for Google+ by default. You should add additional tracking code to your website to get data for other social media like Facebook and Twitter.

By following the above steps you can easily know which social media properties are performing well and which social media interactions are giving best results for your company.

About Contributor: Margaret is a writer/blogger. She loves writing travelling and reading books. She contributes in Engage BDR.