Do We Really Need To Track Social Media?

With the rest of the office either away on their holidays or giving an internet marketing seminar in the nearest town, I’ve had virtually all morning to play around with Google analytics and see if I could get it tracking the social media accounts that we run through our client’s accounts.

However, with Facebook Insights and Bit.ly as the perfect tool for tracking the number of people that click on your Twitter links is there any need for setting up analytics to see the response that your social media campaigns are garnering? After all if no-one liked that picture you put up of your holiday cottage in the Dordogne then they wouldn’t have commented on it, right?

In a way you’re right – you can generally tell how well your Facebook account is doing by the amount of chat taking place on the walls – but that’s not looking at the bigger picture. The purpose of your Facebook page should not only be to build a community around your product, but it should also direct traffic to your main website and, in order to check that it is doing this effectively, you’ll need to set up tracking.

How Do We Set Up Analytics For Social Media?

The process in which you do this is relatively straight-forward, or at least as far as Analytics is concerned. You don’t need to insert code onto a page of your Facebook account and you simply need to set up a UTM address, which you can track through Analytics. I have to admit that I’m a complete novice when it comes to all things HTML so I found it much easier to do this with a UTM code builder.

 Once you’ve got a UTM code you’ll need to insert this in the Facebook sections where you would normally insert your URL. Using one of our client’s campaigns as an example we inserted this link into the website section on their profile and then created another UTM code so that we could track the number of visitors from their Twitter account and placed this in their profile section.

With the UTM code built and placed in the relevant section it was time to set up analytics so that we could start tracking which visitors were coming from our social media campaigns. I did this by creating an advanced segment on analytics and then selecting Traffic Sources from the Dimensions tab.  Dragging the Campaign box into the right hand section, I marked the condition to match the Campaign tag I’d selected when building the UTM code, which in this case was profileURL. 

After giving the segment a name and hitting Apply to Report, I am now able to track the number of people visiting my home page as a result of my social media campaigns.

However, I’m slightly concerned that this functionality is, at the moment, a little on the basic side. Whilst I’m able to track visitors that click through to my website from my profile URL, a vast number of people visit my website through links that I share through Twitter and Facebook. I still use Bit.ly for this purpose as it is a lot less hassle than creating a separate UTM code for each link that I choose to share with my online community. So whilst the way that I’ve tracked my social media campaigns has improved, I wouldn’t say that it’s completely perfect just yet.

I think I need the rest of LeadGenerators to spend another day doing an internet marketing seminar – so that I can finally get this thing figured out!