With the increasing popularity of social media in business there is now a requirement to be able to analyse this traffic and determine it’s true value.
SEO is changing and social signals are clearly influencing rankings, the difficulty is to track these signals especially now that search engines are always evolving at a faster pace.
As the hub of your online presence is now your website, Google has launched social reports within it’s free Google Analytics tool.
The best feature I have come across is Social Visitors Flow, see below for a live example.
Google have made it easy to see at a glance which social networks are feeding your site and how they compare to each other.
The above example clearly shows Facebook is the dominant social network with a high amount of traffic dropping off at the homepage. Working with this client I am advising on how we can retain more traffic and push to encourage engagement with additional content i.e pages and video. The other option we are looking into is setting up a Twitter account to introduce another stream of response.
Along with this option in the new social reports there are also options for tracking goal conversions and social plugins to understand further what type of social buttons are being used on your site.
A very useful tool if understood fully and something which is absolutely free for all.
What are your thoughts on using this report? Do you feel that there are features missing from Google Analytics?
