Social is increasingly important as a marketing channel. But, how do
you measure the impact and effectiveness of your social initiatives?
Four elements define your social impact:
Conversions
Sources
Pages
Social Plugins
Your
Social Impact
- Sources: As your content is shared and people come
to your site, it's important to understand how visitors from different
social sources engage with your site.
- Conversions: Shared content URLs become the entry points into your site, driving traffic from social sources. Measuring the conversion and monetary value of this traffic will help you understand the impact of Social on your business.
- Pages: People increasingly engage with, share, and
discuss content on social networks. It’s important to know which pages
and content are being shared, where they're being shared, and how.
- Social Plugins: Adding Social Plugin buttons to
your site (for example, Google "+1" buttons) allows your users share
content to social networks directly from your site. Your social plugin
data shows you which content is being shared, and on which networks.
The
Social reports allow you to analyze all of this information together and see the complete picture of how Social impacts your business.
Social Reports
Overview
The
Overview report allows you to see at a glance how much conversion value is generated from social channels. The
Social Value graph compares the number and monetary value of all goal completions versus those that resulted from social referrals.
A visit from a social referral may result a conversion immediately or
it may assist in a conversion that occurs later on. Referrals that
generate conversions immediately are labeled as
Last Interaction Social Conversions
in the graph. If a referral from a social source does not immediately
generate a conversion, but the visitor returns later and converts, the
referral is included in
Assisted Social Conversions. Looking at both
assisted and last interaction conversions is essential to understanding the role that Social plays in business outcomes.
Sources
Navigate to
Sources to see engagement metrics
(Pageviews, Avg. Visit Duration, Pages/Visit) for traffic from each
social network. This allows you to see which social networks referred
the highest quality traffic. For example, you may wish to increase your
investment in the social networks that referred fewer visits but higher
quality traffic.
The
Sources report is enhanced with off-site data for
social data hub partner networks.
Click on a partner network to see the URLs that were shared on that
site, how they were shared (for example, via a "+1" or "reshare"
action), and the conversations that took place about your content (
Activity Stream). Read
About Activity Stream Data to learn how this data is collected.
Pages
Navigate to
Pages to see engagement metrics (Pageviews, Avg. Visit Duration, Pages/Visit) for each URL. Sort by
Social Activities in the table to identify your most viral content.
Click a URL in the table to see the originating social networks for that URL. For
social data hub partner networks,
you can also see offsite sharing for the URL: how the URL was shared
(for example, via a "+1" or "reshare" action), the networks on which it
was shared, and the conversations that took place (
Activity Stream). Read
About Activity Stream Data to learn how this data is collected.
Conversions
The
Conversions report allows you to quantify the
value of Social. It shows the total number of conversion and the
monetary value of conversions that occurred as a result of referrals
from each network. Click
Assisted vs Last Interaction Analysis (just below the Explorer tab at the top of the report) to see how each network contributed to conversions and revenue via
assists and
last clicks.
- Assisted Conversions and Assisted Conversion Value:
This is the number (and monetary value) of sales and conversions the social network assisted. An assist
occurs when someone visits your site, leaves without converting, but
returns later to convert during a subsequent visit. The higher these
numbers, the more important the assist role of the social network.
- Last Interaction Conversions and Last Interaction Conversion Value:
This is the number (and monetary value) of last click sales and
conversions. When someone visits your site and converts, the visit is
considered a last click. The higher these numbers, the more important
the social network’s role in driving completion of sales and
conversions.
- Assisted/Last Interaction Conversions:
This ratio summarizes the social network’s overall role. A value close
to 0 indicates that the social network functioned primarily in a last
click capacity. A value close to 1 indicates that the social network
functioned equally in an assist and a last click capacity. The more this
value exceeds 1, the more the social network functioned in an assist
capacity.
Note that you must
define goals and goal values in order to see data in this report.
Social Plug-ins
If you have Google "+1" and Facebook "Like" buttons on your site,
it's important to know which buttons are being clicked and for which
content. For example, if you publish articles on your site, you'll want
to know which articles are most commonly "liked" or shared, and from
which social networks they're being shared (for example, Google+ or
Facebook). You can use this information to create more of the type of
content that's popular with your visitors. Also, if you find that some
buttons are rarely used, you may wish to remove them to reduce clutter.
The
Social Plug-in reports
show which articles on your site are most commonly shared and which
social buttons are being clicked to share them (for example, Google "+1"
or Facebook "Like").
Social Visitors Flow
Social Visitors Flow shows the initial paths that
visitors from social networks took through your site. For example, if
you run campaigns that promote specific products, you can see whether
visitors from each social network entered your site through these
product pages and whether they continued on to other parts of the site
or whether they exited. Hover over a source (Google+, for example) on
the chart and select
View only this segment to focus on traffic from that source.
Setting Up Social Analytics Reporting
In order to see values in your reporting, you'll need to
establish values for your goals and/or
set up ecommerce tracking.
For non-ecommerce goals, a good way to manually configure goal value is
to evaluate how often the visitors who reach the goal become customers.
For example, if your sales team can close 10% of people who request to
be contacted, and your average transaction is $500, you might assign $50
(i.e. 10% of $500) to your "Contact Me" goal. In contrast, if only 1%
of mailing list signups result in a sale, you might only assign $5 to
your "email sign-up" goal.