Google Analytics is an invaluable tool used by individuals and businesses in order to see exactly how their website is performing. From how many clicks a specific link gets each day to what people are searching for, Google Analytics is a very comprehensive tool and can provide you with a large amount of data.
Therefore, we were excited to see that Google Analytics has introduced social media engagement statistics alongside its regular offering.
Both Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools have added this new layer of functionality, which aims to effectively track the tweets, likes, shares and +1s of your website traffic and online content.
This new functionality called Social Plug-In Tracking will work on three different levels:
Visitors > Social > Engagement This enables you to see how the activity of people that have used social actions to get to or engage with your site compares to the activity of people that haven’t. You can then isolate the social actions and compare them, for instance whether someone who arrived at a post via a tweet will spend longer on a site than someone who arrived at the same post via a Facebook link.
Visitors > Social > Action This section allows users to compare actions between social sources, so you can see how many Twitter actions there have been in total in comparison to the number of Facebook likes.
Visitors > Social > Pages This allows users to see how different pages compare between social actions, so you’re able to see whether a certain page invites more Twitter sharing than Facebook liking.
This will be a huge benefit for businesses and website owners and will give them real insight into just how people are getting to their website and interacting with the content using social media.
Tip: If you haven’t already, make sure you click the ‘New Version’ link on your Google Analytics home page. Google has made a whole host of changes and has included them in the new version, which also has a much more easy-to-use and intuitive user interface.
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