Do you know what to analyze with Analytics?

Hey Guerilleros, I know I’ve been out for WAY too long, but there’s way too much going on right now and updating this awesome kind of got pushed to the sidelines.

But I want to come back today talking about something that has been constantly on mind now that I’m managing multiple blogs and social communities. It’s a pretty hardcore guerilla that many social media marketers continue to get bombed at.

I’m going to touch a simple aspect of tracking social media referral traffic using Google Analytics.

1. Traffic Sources

Where is your social media marketing most effective?

This is very basic, but is a major part of your guerilla – you need to know where your wins are coming from. It does you no good to spend hours on social bookmarking places if your real traffic comes from Youtube.

Of course, there are secondary advantages of using social bookmarks, but you get the point – if you’re active on one platform, it will undoubtedly work better for you.

And here’s the key point most people miss when determining social media ROI: you dont have to ponder secondary benefits (awareness, exposure, etc..), at least initially. Track salaried hours and social media expenses against measurable results – traffic, leads, referring links.

That’s ROI when it comes to social media, at its primary stage. But when you’re trying to analyze what your results are, look at the report on the left side and ask yourself:

“are these sites where my market ‘hangs out’?”

If it is, then great.

But some guerilleros have no idea where their market hangs out… Those guys just go out and fight for every inch – no matter which direction they’re going. For those guys, there’s more analytics.

2. Understand How Social Visitors Act On Your Site

Here’s the complete report for the picture above:

Track visitors' experience for each social media platform

You’ll see on the table above: visits – pages/visit – avg time on site – %new visits – %bounce rate.
What those tell you is basically this:
Your visitor came, looked at X number of pages, in about X minutes. But out of everybody that came to your site, X hit the back button without clicking on a single link.

So your job when tracking social media marketing ROI is to analyze who’s connecting with your content in a more efficient way – You can even add conversion tracking to your analytics:

analytics tracking conversions

With simple interpretation of raw data, you’ve just found out which platform gives you the best results. If it’s Youtube, darn, get more videos up! If it’s Facebook, spend some more time connecting and updating your status.

It’s easier to spread your social guerilla marketing all over, but it’s hard to win a battle. If you’re winning, stay on top of it!

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