Here at Digital Media Team, we all know the importance of maintaining organic social performance to help build a brand. But how do social media platforms exactly affect your wider website performance?
Don’t get us wrong, Google Analytics isn’t organic social’s best friend. Tracking any sort of social traffic using Google Analytics is quite convoluted in general, to the woe of social media managers. However, you can get a pretty good indication on the effect of organic social performance through it!
Whether you want to track demographics, on-site behaviour or what products your audience purchase, Google Analytics is packed filled with data for social media managers to use, plus it’s free, making it even better.
So where to start? Here’s our little guide for tracking your organic social through Google Analytics.
- Segments are your best mates
Segments are essentially pools of users you can apply to your overall view of Google Analytics. If you want to view exactly how your social traffic performs, you can create a custom segment for exactly that.
Click on ‘new segment’ followed by ‘advanced conditions’ and add ‘social’ to your default channel grouping. You can also create segments purely based on certain social media platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. Segments will allow you to get really granular and compare how each platform performs, as chances are, there will be huge differences between them!
- Delve deeper into who your audience actually are
So you’ve got your segments, now apply them! Once applied, head on over to the ‘audience’ section. Here you can find everything from demographics to interests to geographical location. If you’re ever trying to visualise who your organic social audience are, then this is a great place to start.
For content ideas, take a look at the interests section. Here you’ll find ‘in-market’ audiences and ‘affinity’ audiences. In-market audiences are consumers in in the market for your brand’s product, whilst affinity audiences consider someone’s overall interests and lifestyle. Affinity audiences, that your brand will reach, are a similar audience to your existing in-market audience.
- Track what pages are valuable to your audience
Okay, so you’ve applied your segment, here’s where it gets more interesting. Ever wondered what your social followers actually purchase from your posts? Well this is where you need to pay attention to your page value.
For a quick overview of pages that convert on social, head on over to ‘behaviour’, followed by ‘site content’, then ‘all pages’. On the right hand side, you will see a column titled ‘page value’ – page value is the average value for a page that a user visited before landing on the goal page or completing an eCommerce transaction (or both). The higher the page value, the higher the chance users will convert on that page. It shows which pages in particular are valuable to your users, as to put it bluntly, it’s where they convert.
Rather than traffic alone, page value gives you an indication of what website content your followers actually convert from!
- Find out what products your audience actually purchase
By this point, you should have an idea of which pages are actually valuable to your audience. But what about which products your organic audience purchase? With segments, you can head on over to ‘eCommerce’, then ‘product performance’. Here you’ll find a detailed breakdown of products that are purchased through your posts.
You’ll often find there’s a pretty big difference between purchases from organic social and purchases from other marketing channels, as each audience is different. Treat each marketing channel a little differently and you’re on to a winning marketing strategy.
Google Analytics is an absolute game-changer for tracking and user insight. You can get super granular analysing your audience and we’ve only just touched the surface of it all.
If you need help with your organic social performance, get in touch! Drop us a line on 0161 393 2123, email hello@digitalmediateam.co.uk or catch us on social!
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