A Revolutionary Guide to Measuring Social Media Impact in Real-Time with Google Analytics!

In today’s digital world, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn have become a vital part of every business’s marketing strategy. From small businesses to multinational corporations, they use social media platforms to connect with their audiences and increase brand awareness.

However, measuring the impact of social media campaigns can be challenging. Many businesses rely on vanity metrics such as likes, shares, and followers, which don’t provide a true picture of engagement and conversions. To obtain accurate insights and measure social media impact in real-time, businesses need to use advanced tools like Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help businesses track their website’s performance and user behavior. But did you know that you can also use Google Analytics to measure the impact of your social media campaigns? Here’s a revolutionary guide to using Google Analytics for measuring social media impact:

Step 1: Set up Goals in Google Analytics

To measure the impact of your social media campaigns, you need to set up goals in Google Analytics. Goals are specific actions that visitors take on your website, such as filling out a contact form, making a purchase, or downloading a whitepaper. By setting up goals, you can track the actions visitors take after clicking on your social media posts.

Step 2: Tag your Social Media Campaigns

To measure the impact of your social media campaigns, you need to tag your posts with UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters. UTM parameters are tags that you add to your URLs to track the source, medium, and campaign name of each visit. By tagging your social media campaigns, you can track which social media platform is driving the most traffic, which posts are getting the most clicks, and which posts are generating the most conversions.

Step 3: Create Custom Reports

Once you have set up goals and tagged your social media campaigns, you can create custom reports in Google Analytics to measure your social media impact. Custom reports allow you to analyze your social media campaigns’ performance and identify which campaigns are driving the most traffic, generating the most leads, and producing the most revenue.

Step 4: Analyze Real-Time Data

The final step is to analyze real-time data to measure the impact of your social media campaigns as they happen. Real-time data allows you to track the immediate results of your social media posts and adjust your strategies accordingly. By analyzing real-time data, you can identify which posts are resonating with your audience, which campaigns are generating the most traffic, and which posts are failing to engage your audience.

In conclusion, measuring the impact of your social media campaigns can be challenging, but with Google Analytics, it’s easier than ever before. By setting up goals, tagging your social media campaigns, creating custom reports, and analyzing real-time data, you can measure your social media impact accurately and make data-driven decisions to improve your social media strategy. So, start using Google Analytics today and revolutionize the way you measure your social media impact!

If you have a website, you’re probably using an analytics tool like Google Analytics to track and measure your site’s traffic and success. In addition to all of the normal great functionality of Google Analytics, you now have the option to see your site stats in a new way with Real-Time reporting. The Real-Time feature allows you to see information about your site visitors at any given moment like how many visitors are on your website, what page they are viewing, and demographic details. Intrigued? Let’s take a look at how this feature can help you measure your social media impact.

Access Real-Time Reports

To access the Real-Time feature, log into your Google Analytics page as usual and click on the Home tab from the menu options. In the top left sidebar, select the Real-Time option.

Overview

In the Overview tab, you’ll see all of the metrics in one complete dashboard. In the top section, you’ll see how many visitors are currently on your site and if they are new or returning, what source brought them there, what articles they are reading, and the pageviews per minute. This can help you determine the impact of the content you’re distributing. After releasing a blog post and sharing it in Twitter, log into your Google Analytice Real-Time dashboard to see the engagement. You can do that with all of your social media channels to see how much traffic certain topics generate. When the view counts slow down, you know it’s time to re-engage.

In the bottom section, you’ll see what keywords brought them to your site and the demographics of the visitor. This information will be extremely helpful when creating Ad-Word campaigns for marketing your site.

Locations

In the locations tab, you’ll still see how many visitors are on your site., but it will display in a color coded bar by country. Just below that you’ll see the breakdown by country and visitors from each as well as a map view. This is helpful information if you have an international business. Being able to see the average time a certain country interacts with your site, you can maximize your time on social media by posting content time specific to that location.

If you prefer to use Google Earth VS the map view, click on the tab and enable Google Earth to see your visitor locations displayed differently. I wasn’t able to get that feature to work but it is part of the interface. Hopefully the full release will fix that.

Traffic Sources

In the Traffic Sources tab, you’ll see what brought visitors to your site. This can help you determine what social media sites people are most engaged with. Below the number of visitors currently on the site, you’ll also see if the traffic is direct or organic.

Content

The content section shows you what content visitors are currently viewing and also has an option see the pageviews for the last 30 minutes. Knowing what content is being viewed will help you to determine if your latest blog post or contest are engaging to your audience.

With this kind of instant measurement, you can now have a better picture of your marketing efforts in the short term in addition to your long term results. It seems like a perfect addition to what already has great capability to help you manage your website and marketing. What do you plan to use Real-Time to measure?

Jessica is a Support Technician for Cytanium Hosting who loves to teach people how to use modern technology to be more productive and organized. Simple tips, tricks and tools can make anyone computer savvy! You can follow her on Twitter @learningrl or visit her blog at www.learningrl.net.

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