Google Analytics Adds Social Media Tracking
John Borkowski, July 25, 2011
Google’s obviously jumping on the social media horse (addition of Google + ) and furthers that today by now adding social media data to their analytic platform. Their +1 button data is built in to the platform, and they’ve released the coding that illustrates such social data including Engagement, Action and Pages. This coding for Facebook’s “Like” button and Twitter’s “Tweet” button can be found on the analytic page .
As social media has been playing more and more of a role in our everyday lives and has direct effects with the success of many online businesses, the time has been there for a while for Google to add this coding. As important as seeing website traffic deriving from search engines, it’s now equally important to track traffic from social media platforms.
With Engagement, traffic from social media sources are indicated. In addition, analytics will indicate if visitors actually make a conversion, share it with their network, and visit other pages on the website.
Social Actions will indicate such data including how many visitors click on the “like” or “tweet” button, from which source, and how long they were on the website for from that button. Time of day and location are normal features that will also report with social actions.
Lastly, Pages will indicate which section of the website (page) generates the most “likes” or “tweets” which will help marketers understand which pages are most “social friendly” and which pages actually draw a crowd to the website.
