If you’re using social media to get the word out about your business or brand, using Google Analytics to track the social media traffic on your site is an awesome way to see if your efforts are working.
Using Google Analytics, though, can be complicated. Which reports are the best for telling you how your social media campaigns are doing? How can you easily access those reports?
In this post, we’ll go over what Google Analytics can tell you about your social media traffic and how to find the reports you need to analyze that traffic.
What Google Analytics Can Tell You About Social Media Traffic
If you’re thinking about using Google Analytics to check your social media referral stats, that’s a great idea! There are a bunch of things that Google Analytics can tell you about your social media traffic, including:
- If your social media traffic is converting
- How long social media traffic is spending on your site
- What percentage of your site’s overall sessions are from social media
- How many pages social media traffic is viewing on average before leaving
- How much traffic each social platform is sending
- What your top landing pages from social media are
With all of that data, you can make decisions about what you’re doing that’s working on social media, and what could be improved.
Ready to take a look at your social media traffic in Google Analytics? Let’s dive in.
Where to Find Google Analytics Social Media Reports
Google Analytics 4 does not have specific social media reports. Instead, you’ll just find your social traffic within your other reports.
Let’s start with the Acquisition Overview. Go to Acquisition » Traffic acquisition. In this report, you’ll be able to find each of your social networks separately in the table, like YouTube here:
You can use the search bar to search for each social network, or scroll until you find them to see their numbers.
To see your social traffic in general against your other channels, click the Session source/medium dropdown under the Search bar. Choose Session default channel grouping to change the way your channels are organized.
You’ll now see your social traffic lumped into Organic Social, Organic Video, Paid Social, and Paid Video, depending on what kinds of campaigns you’re running.
This report is great for seeing how your social media traffic compares to your other traffic sources.
How to Track Social Media in WordPress
If you’re using WordPress, there’s a way that you can track your basic social media traffic stats right in your WordPress dashboard.
How? With ExactMetrics.
ExactMetrics is the best premium WordPress analytics plugin. With ExactMetrics, there’s a whole list of things you can set up and monitor in Google Analytics and your WordPress dashboard, plus a referral traffic report with social media sources.
Our most popular features include:
- Easy enhanced ecommerce setup and tracking through WooCommerce
- Top outbound and top affiliate link clicks
- GDPR compliance
- Scroll tracking
- Form tracking
- Popular posts or products widget
With ExactMetrics, all your most important metrics are right there in your WordPress dashboard.
Social Media Traffic Monitoring in WordPress with Referral Reports
When you open your ExactMetrics dashboard reports, you’ll find your Top 10 Referrals report right there in the Overview. Here’s what that report would look like when Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram (with Linktree) are your top referral sources:
With this report, you can see at-a-glance if your social media posts are sending the amount of traffic to your website that you’re hoping for.
Get started with ExactMetrics now.
Create Custom URLs for Social Media Monitoring
Another way you can track social media traffic is by creating custom URLs with UTM codes for your campaigns. Using the ExactMetrics URL Builder, you can add bits of code called parameters to track the links you share on social media more in depth.
To create a unique link, go to ExactMetrics and then click Tools. Here you’ll see the URL Builder. Next, enter the parameters for your URL for the tool to spit out the URL you can share.
The campaigns you create with this tool will then show up in Google Analytics reports.
That’s all!
We hope this guide helped you to learn how to track social media traffic with Google Analytics.
If you’re using social media to grow your business, we think you’ll like 30 Epic Marketing Hacks for Explosive Traffic Growth.
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