3 min.
Social Analytics: Google Analytics measures engagement and ROI on social media
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Social Analytics: Google Analytics measures engagement and ROI on social media

  • TECHNICAL LEVEL
Analytics & Tracking

It's fresh out of the oven: Google just announced this morning, live from SES New York, a brand new feature along with a new set of reports that will be added to the existing Google Analytics reports: the " Social Analytics”. In a nutshell, Social Analytics is all about measuring your visitors' interactions and engagement with your content on social media, both online and offline. Google Analytics therefore no longer simply measures the social interactions that take place with your content on your site only; the tool is now taking another step towards an integrated solution, oriented as usual towards conversion. Is the measurement of return on investment and conversions from social media still a utopia in early 2012? According to Google, not at all!

Google Analytics, as we know, has always been conversion-oriented. And that's good, it's also a daily obsession at Adviso that shines through in all the strategies and actions that we put in place for our clients.

The big shift that Google Analytics is taking today aims precisely to fill this glaring gap that remains when it comes to measuring the return on investment of social media campaigns and tactics. Tools like Radian6 or Social Mention (to name a few) take care of listening to what is being said about your brand or your products. And it's very good like that: they are there for that! But it's when it comes to seeing the explicit connection between these conversations and what they generate in terms of sales and business goals that things get complicated. This is where the Analytics Social Data Hub comes in. The days when you had to be satisfied with seeing the number of your "fans" or "followers" increase and deplore their decline are well and truly over: Analytics now wants to allow marketing decision-makers to take their analyzing and directly linking their investments to their online business goals.

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Analytics Social Data Hub

 

The Analytics Social Data Hub allows participating social platforms to integrate their activity feeds with Google Analytics. In other words, all actions (+1, comments, votes, "likes") that take place on your website and on participating social platforms are recorded in the Google Analytics social reports, and are linked in essence to all existing Google Analytics features and data. Among these, we obviously find the conversion objectives, as well as all the possibilities of data segmentation. And among the participating platforms, there are of course some Google products such as Google+ and Blogger, but also Delicious, Digg, TypePad or even WordPress. Facebook remains unfortunately (!!!) the great absentee from this program, and it is probably not in the near future that we will see it docking with the Social Data Hub, for obvious reasons that we all know.

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Reports

 

These new reports will appear in the traffic sources section.

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Here is how this new range of reports will appear in the interface.

 

Sources

As the name suggests, this report will contain all of the social sources that sent traffic to your website. It will be possible to segment each source by pages or by network/action to understand what content generated these visits and see if this content was then shared by your visitors.

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For participating platforms (we recognize them thanks to the presence of the sharing icon), it will be possible to display the activity stream in order to analyze the interactions with your content that have taken place outside your website.

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Pages

The page report will tell you which content receives the most traffic from social media as well as the pages that generate the most social interactions through the sharing chips installed on your site (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc).

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CONVERSION

The conversion report will help understand "how much" by getting the big picture of the social sources that are converting and ultimately creating value. Conversion goals and e-commerce are fully integrated into these new reports. In addition, these reports follow the same model as the multi-channel conversion funnel reports, allowing you to analyze the participation (assist) of social sources in the conversions recorded what the classic model of attribution of the conversion to the last known traffic source does not help. We will therefore find the "Last interaction social conversion" for visits from a social source that generate a conversion immediately, and the "Assisted social conversion" metric for visits that return later and convert.

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Flux des visiteurs sociaux (Social visitor flow)

This report is in line with previous navigation visualization reports, but this time focuses on social sources only. It allows an in-depth analysis of the navigation paths taken by your visitors from social sources.

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Needless to say, we're all super excited about these new reports! We'll leave you with a tweet to ponder this week:

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