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Master your B2B social media reporting with these 3 Google Analytics tricks
In B2B social media, a lot of time is spent driving clicks and referrals. These magic metrics help marketers justify their spend and can win over skeptics.
That’s the great thing about social, everything can be counted.
There are dozens of tools to help you understand social performance on the networks themselves, but I’m going to focus on how to better understand your visitors once they’ve reached your website.
Web analytics can help you identify where exactly your traffic has come from, what they do once they reach your site and analyse the importance of B2B social media to your traffic.
Use Custom URLs
Google Analytics is great for giving you a rough idea of where your traffic is coming from, but sometimes you need more exact data.
You can do this with custom URLs. These are tailor-made web links that give you specific referral codes in Google Analytics. They contain these parameters:
utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_Pulse=Charlie%20&utm_campaign=Promo
These can help you distinguish between multiple activities on the same domain. For instance, they could help you separate Twitter referrals from your corporate account and your CEO account.
Results can now be separated using the Source/Medium dimension in Google Analytics
Build Custom Channels
Google Analytics does a good (but not great) job of categorising your traffic into sources (found in Acquistion>All Traffic>Channels).
Dig a little deeper and you’ll find many sources that have been incorrectly categorised for your needs. For instance, maybe your Google Plus activity is coming into “search” rather than “social”.
You can fix this by setting up your own custom channel definitions. To do this, go to the admin tab and on the far right click “Custom Channel Grouping”.
Set up a custom social channel and use source/medium as your rules. Then type in the domains that you consider to be social. Remember to use “OR” rather than “AND”.
Now return to your channels page and click on “Default Channel Grouping” and select your custom defined channel instead.
Your traffic will now be correctly allocated to your categories.
Check Social User Flow
It’s easy to forget that securing the click is not the end of the story. Yes it’s important to know where your traffic is coming from, but it’s equally vital to track where it goes once users reach your site.
Are they leaving straight away? Are they going to your blog or even your ecommerce pages? (The dream!)
The social user flow chart is a very easy way to understand how your social visitors behave once they reach your website.
This allows you to see at a glance which social networks are driving traffic to which pages and where they go from there.
Used in combination with custom URLs and custom channels, it shouldn’t take you long to understand the role that B2B social media plays in your business.
If this article has helped you out, or if you disagree with something I’ve said, I’d love to hear from you on Twitter.
