Any online business that isn’t already utilising social media to get ahead needs to get their skates on.
Social media is brilliant for business because it allows you to both improve your page rankings and create brand awareness; and increase traffic, subscribers and sales, all for free.
But if you are not tracking social media campaign success with analytics packages, you are not honing your campaigns to where they are most effective.
Social media campaigns
The most obvious and important aspect to track in any of your social media campaigns is the referring sites; that is, which websites visitors have come from via a link to your site.
You’ll get to see not only which of your social networking sites have brought traffic to your site, but also which other sites and blogs like and have picked up your campaign.
In Google Analytics, this information is simply listed under ‘referring sites’ with information conveying how many visits each referring site produced, how many pages on average visitors viewed from each referring site, the average time visitors spent on site, the percentage of new visitors the site brought and the bounce rate of visitors.
Referring sites
All of this information allows you to engage deeper with the referring sites, and understand which work best for your content, allowing you to streamline your campaigns.
It allows you to see which of the referring sites are bringing you visitors that are spending extended time on your site. For example, visitors from Facebook might be spending on average 50 percent more time on your site than those from Twitter and StumbleUpon. A particularly useful analytics function on analytics service BLVD Status, for example, lets you track social media buttons like TweetMeme’s Retweet button.
While all of this will tell you which sites are sending the most traffic, what you really need to know is which sites are sending you traffic that generates sales or leads. Understand your conversion paths better and target the referring sites that are bringing you the most conversions.
Promote your own backlinks
Social media campaigns can generate thousands of links which will in turn improve your page rankings, but you can further bolster these rankings if you promote your own back links via social media.
Investigate your backlink count using Google Webmaster Tools, and then Tweet, Stumble and Facebook the most high profile ones. Helping these sites go further via social media will in turn help your own rankings.
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