Social media has a great impact on websites, by improving their viewership to a great extent. But till now, there is no tool available to measure the impact of social media. Google Analytics provides the solution to this in the form of ‘social reports’.
Google Analytics has recently unveiled a new set of social reports to help connect social media statistics with business, by giving a clear picture of how social media is benefiting a particular site.
The changes were announced in the Analytics blog. Phil Mui, Google Analytics group product manager said that the Analytics would:
“–Identify the full traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions.
–Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs).
–Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs.”
Mui also said, “Our goal with the new reports is to tie social activities and referrals to measurable, meaningful economic value so businesses can more effectively evaluate which social channels are impacting their bottom line, and which tactics will lead to measurable economic value.”
The New Social Report
The current reports under the ‘social’ tab of Google Analytics are Engagement, Action and pages. The forthcoming new set of reports will be Overview, Sources, Pages, Conversions, Social Plugins and Social Visitors Flow.
Overview Report
The overview report consists of data from all the other social reports. This report lets users see how much value is generated from the different social media sites.
Sources Report
It shows the engagement and conversion statistics for each social network so that users can see how people are interacting with their content. It also allows users to see the effect of the current social media campaigns.
Pages Report
The pages report shows the social activity pagewise. It lets users know what happened on the site precisely. The complete statistics for a page will be shown in this report.
Conversion Report
This report allows users to see how many social conversions have originated from different social media sites regarding the specific site. The users can also see the monetary value that is driven from the conversions.
Social Plugins Report
The social plugins report gives the summary of the pages and shows how many times a page was shared via the Google +1 button or Twitter. The impact of Facebook ‘like’ or LinkedIn share cannot be measured as of now but it can be done in the future.
Social Visitors Flow Report
This report displays the path followed by website visitors coming from social sources.
Every detail is possible because of the social data hub which was launched last December by Google. This enabled social networks to send activity data to Google Analytics. This social information would be of great help to marketers. The new social reports will be available to all users within the next few weeks.
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