Social media is rocking our world. You’ve set up your site with your social media accounts – now what?
Jill Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings, a pioneer in search engine optimization explains how to more accurately measure social media marketing efforts by using tracking links to create «campaigns» in web analytics.
Horst Joepen, CEO Searchmetrics, explains how to evaluate the success of social media efforts.
Summary from a webinar by Search Marketing Now.
Today there are so many sources available that it’s not possible to measure all signals around. Still, a comprehensive and consistent tracking of social media efforts can trigger significant business opportunities.
Adding tracking codes to all campaigns is the start of measuring the effects. The results are more complete when also newsletters, email signatures, conversion points of the website are tagged. Obviously major social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn should be included.
Typically the following tags for campaign tracking will provide a wealth of information:
- &utm_campaign=YOUR_CAMPAIGN_NAME
- &utm_source=YOUR_MEDIA_CHANNELS
- &utm_medium=BLOG_or_MAIL_or_NEWSLETTER_etc
An example would look like http://example.com/name-of-article&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=name-of-article&utm_campaign=socialmedia
As per usual, before we measure things, we should think about compelling content first that people will want to share… Successful topics on one’s website or blog should be identified in order to understand the audience’s needs and interest. On which social media channels do they share your content? What is the correlation between organic search visibility and links from social networks? What measures do competitors take?
Identify Topics that Buzz for your Business
Example: ‹highrankings.com› is analyzed in SearchMetrics› tool.
The outstanding bubble on the upper right is about a popular forum with lots of social media shares. Probably you want to create even more content like the one that is currently popular with an audience.
SearchMetrics› tool will also visualize the social spread across major social media networks.
Traffic competitors can be identified in order to analyze their activities and potentially compete on the same terms.
Content Tagging
The Google URL Builder Tool compiles the tagged link for a given landing page via a wizard.
There are also bookmarklets available that will allow for compilation of a tagged link from any page in the browser. This will go into an URL-shortener service that will come up with a nicely short tagged URL.
Content Analysis
The analytics results can be visualized in different ways. E.g. Google Analytics or alternative tools like Getclicky.com let you slice and dice the information in numerous ways. You will want to optimize your marketing efforts based on these statistics.
Google+ is bringing surprisingly much traffic. And it’s expected to rise even more now that Google is pushing hard for their inhouse social media service.
Real time analytics as available on Google Analytics are addictive, make sure you don’t watch your stats all day long ;-)
Conversions via social media are usually relatively low, potentially within the 0.5% range: It’s rare that someone reads a tweet and goes buying your product. Hence it’s more important to track little steps like newsletter sign-ups, file downloads, send-a-friend, fan on Facebook, follow on Twitter, etc.
Funnel analysis
Google Analytics now offers sophisticated funnel analysis visualization.
Tagged URLs are sometimes stripped on their way through the countless switches on the world wide web. Therefore it’s important to also check the referrals such as t.co for Twitter in the traffic statistics.
The secondary dimension ‹Landing Page› can help identifying sources with indecipherable referral URLs.
Advanced Segments in Google Analytics allow for different views of the comprehensive data set.
The Twitter URL signature can be a significant traffic driver. Make sure you lead that traffic to a well converting page, potentially not the homepage but maybe the newsletter subscribing page!
With tagged URLs you may end up with different URLs for the same content, hence the need for the canonical tag in order to avoid duplicate content issues with search engines. The canonical tag will tell Google, Bing and the sorts which is the ‹original content› URL and that they should ignore all other URLs that start with the same domain and address but have tagging information attached after the URL’s question mark.
Searchmetrics offers Searchmetrics Essentials – try for free!
Jill Whalen is a pioneer in search engine optimization, beginning in the field in the early 1990s and founding High Rankings in 1995. The company is committed to helping small to mid-sized businesses understand and implement techniques that maximize the potential of their websites, so that these organizations can fulfill their mission, meet the needs of their stakeholders and contribute as worthwhile members of the Internet community.
Horst Joepen is responsible for general management and strategy at Searchmetrics, the leading vendor of integrated search analytics software worldwide. With a broad background in internet and software technology, he is a successful software entrepreneur in online marketing, CRM and IT security markets. Dr. Joepen and the Searchmetrics team pioneered the search analytics market in 2007 and continue to innovate with the companyÃs proprietary Search Performance Index, which was most commonly referenced during the 2011 Google algorithm updates. Dr. Joepen has been quoted in leading newspapers such as The New York Times, Le Monde and The Guardian and is the author of numerous IT publications. He speaks frequently about SEO tools and trends at search marketing events around the world.
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