Chapter 7: Measuring the Success of Your Social Media Presence with Google Analytics

Whether you want to increase the number of your followers, drive social media users to your library's website, or improve event attendance through social media marketing, clear goals are essential to a successful social media strategy. How will you measure these goals? Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter offer built-in metrics for measuring the effectiveness of your social media presence. These platform-provided analytics collect invaluable demographic data about your followers and how they engage with your channels. If you are not already monitoring these built-in analytics, it is time to start. (1) Although these platform-provided metrics are indispensable, they alone do not provide a comprehensive view of how users engage with your library's social media accounts. Facebook Insights, for instance, records how many times your followers click a link to an event registration web page on your library website, but it cannot tell you if they actually registered for the event. This is where Google Analytics comes in. With some simple customizations and basic technical knowledge, you can configure Google Analytics to provide a wealth of data about your social media channels, including how much traffic they drive to your website and what those social media users do on your website. This chapter highlights useful Google Analytics social media reports and discusses the importance of using campaign URLs to measure the success of your social media marketing. Installing Google Analytics for Tracking Social Media To get started, you will need a free Google Analytics account, and it is highly recommended you use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to manage how Google Analytics tracks social media traffic to your various library websites and online tools. The GTM container snippet is not installed on your social media websites. Instead, it should be added to each website you want to monitor for incoming social media traffic--for instance, your library website, online catalog, LibGuides, and so on. Refer to chapter 2 of this issue of Library Technology Reports for specifics on how to generate and install the GTM container snippet. Google Analytics https://analytics.google.com Google Tag Manager http://tagmanager.google.com/?hl=en Google Analytics Social Reports Once you configure and add GTM (with a Google Analytics tag) to your website, Google Analytics provides a number of Social reports that focus on users coming to your website from a social media website. Simply navigate to the Acquisition report section in Google Analytics and select Social to view the available reports. [FIGURE 7.1 OMITTED] If your aim is to use social media simply to drive traffic to your website, then the Social Network Referrals report (figure 7.1) provides you with the data you need to measure this process. This report lists the social network website that referred users to your website along with the number of sessions and pageviews those users generated, their average session duration, and the average number of pages they viewed per session. Clicking the name of the social network in the report provides a list of the web page links that successfully sent users from a social media post to your website. Most Social reports are ready to use out of the box, but some require additional customizations to improve their data reporting ability. The Social Users Flow report gives you a pageview-by-pageview account of where social media users go after they land on your website. By default, the Social Users Flow report groups users based on the social network they used to find your website, but it can also group users based on the social media post if you implement Campaigns URLs. Improving Social Media Tracking with Campaign URLs and UTM Parameters Google Analytics Social reports are not perfect for several reasons. First, Google Analytics accidently registers some social media referral traffic as direct traffic, which does not appear in the Social reports. …