How are you measuring your social media impact in Google Analytics? If your answer looks like this rogue report, you are most certainly missing out on a lot of valuable data …
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The reason is that anyone who clicks on a link to your site from a desktop app, such as TweetDeck, shows up in Google Analytics as direct traffic. Because the lack of tracking from social media has become pandemic for companies — even enterprise companies that are investing tens of thousands of dollars into social media — I thought it’s something that needs to be addressed. Not tracking it doesn’t just rob you of your social media data; it bloats your direct traffic data, making it just shy of useless.
That said, if you’re mostly using social media to increase brand awareness and aren’t inclined to track what these ADD visitors actually do on your site, no harm no foul. Just keep building that brand and having fun. Just don’t take those direct numbers to the bank. People aren’t that into you. Sorry.
Quick aside: Same goes with links in your emails as well. But I’m not going to get off topic. Save to say just think of all the people using desktop email clients. Painful, huh? [flush]
Tagging 101
The solution to this tracking problem is actually very straightforward (yay), but the implementation can get a little tortuous (sigh).
First, let’s cover the basics of tagging. You don’t have to be a coder to tag links for Google Analytics. Google provides a URL builder that you can use to build your URLs, but I prefer the one offered by ROI Revolution because it keeps the required fields together, which makes more sense to me. All you do is fill in the blanks and follow the steps.
I’ll avoid insulting your intelligence by regurgitating the instructions on the page. It even gives you good ideas for how to use each of the parameters, but I’ll still include my little tips from the trenches. Deep, treacherous data trenches.
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Choosing Your Campaign Naming Convention
Campaign Source: This should be the name of the site the link lives on, e.g., twitter, facebook, etc. I use lower case to avoid having a link that suffers from camel case — a pet peeve of mine.
Campaign Medium: I recommend using social+media for your medium. (Using the + sign translates into spaces in your GA reports.) Some people use the source name again for medium, but I advise against this. For reporting purposes, you want to have a bigger bucket that you can then segment by source. For example, you could look at the revenue or leads your social media campaigns have generated and then break those numbers down by source to flesh out who your heavy lifters are.
Campaign Name: This is the name you want to give your campaign. As you develop a fully functional campaign ecosystem, you’ll come up with campaigns that span different mediums, so you want to be especially strategic in naming your campaigns.
Campaign Term/Content: These parameters aren’t required for social media links. They’re more for CPC campaigns that you have to manually tag. However, I would commandeer the Campaign Term parameter for one client and use it to record banner sizes since it was just going to waste. It would look like utm_term=728×90. At the end of the day, as long as you know what you’re using these parameters for, all’s fair in love and analytics. 
How It All Works Together
Let’s say you run a Christmas early bird BOGO sale. You might want to call the Campaign Name something like xmas+bogo+sale. Then, if you put links out on Twitter, you can set Source to twitter. If you send out an email, just change the Source to your company name and Medium to email. And if you have banner ads, change Source to whatever site the banner resides on (whether yours or an external site) and Medium banner.
By following a consistent naming convention you can track the overall success of a campaign and segment by Source and Medium. That’s ninja analysis there and much more effective than starting from scratch with every campaign. Without this structure in place, each person in the company creating links may have his/her own ideas of the best taxonomy structure, and your reports will be a big, hot mess that don’t lend themselves to segmentation.
I also recommend keeping a spreadsheet with all of these campaign variables for reference for future tagging. It will save you a ton of time in going back through reports to figure out if you put the month and year for a newsletter link at the beginning or end of the Campaign Name.
Shortcut for Creating Tagged Links for Social Media
Some desktop apps will allow you to add your tracking parameters right in their interface. Okay, so I only know of one, HootSuite. But I’m sure there are others. (Surely, HootSuite can’t be the only marketer-friendly app, right?)
Anyway, it’s super easy. You just enter your URL in the shortener field, then click the down-facing arrow to the right and choose Custom URL Parameters. That will open a window where you can enter your parameters. First, choose Google Analytics from the preset drop-down menu. Next, add your parameters. Finally, click Done because, well, you’re done. Well, you’re not actually done done because you still have to click the Shrink button. But when you’ve done that, you’re definitely done.
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(Annnd now I have the mollusk/sea cucumber joke from Finding Nemo stuck in my head because of how that all played out in my head. Okay, moving on …)
Where to Find the Reports
After you’ve tagged your links, you will find all of your beautiful data in the Campaigns reports in Google Analytics (Traffic Sources > Campaigns).
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From there you can segment your data however you’d like and cull all of the juicy insights you can from it.
Learn more analytics tips and tricks and give us a hollah on Twitter or Facebook.
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There’s a mollusk, see? And he walks up to a sea…
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He doesn’t walk up, he swims up.
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Actually, the mollusk isn’t moving.
Great points. Taking those extra steps to tag your campaigns and links will really help you to see what’s working.
Yes, it will, Dan. It’s amazing how much of a story the data will tell you, especially if you have campaigns that span multiple mediums.
Guys, this was n extremely useful post! I had no idea this could be done, especially the Google tool to build URL’s. Thank You!
Thanks, Lisa. I’m glad it helped you. I could eat this stuff for dinner.
Great post, thank you. This is very useful information for me. I had no idea this was so easy to do.
You’re in good company.
Humm.. Nice post, I will implement this in one of my high traffic blog
Thanks Annie, this is such a great post and so many people don’t realise the importance of tracking their social media activities.
Thanks, Lilach. It’s a shame since it’s really not that hard to do.
Unfortunately this creates long, bloated URLs stuffed with parameters that mean nothing to end users (for whom URLs are primarily meant) who just want to share or bookmark the page. And after enough time and/or virality has passed the tracking data would start to become inaccurate again as people find the links through different media or visit them directly. I wish there were a better solution.
Hugh–
There is. By using a branded URL shortener (like bit.ly Pro or Clickst), you can preserve transparency for the end-user (ie, nyti.ms) and obfuscate the tracking codes. We recommend this as best-practice for our customers, so URLs are brand-transparent. We also track enough information to know where a URL originated and where it’s been clicked on, even if those are different.
We also do this without requiring an 11-minute video or Builder wizard.
(Disclosure: I am the founder of Clickst http://www.click.st)
We’ve worked to solve this problem with Clickst. Not only do we track what outgoing network you are sharing to, we can determine the return traffic as well as drill in to specific users that are driving the best earned media.
(Disclosure: I am the founder of Clickst (www.click.st), and a recovering mistake-making social media marketer)
Guys,
Users don’t care if there are parameters on the end of your URLs; they care about quality content. And a branded URL shortener isn’t going to be enough to track social visitors through your conversion funnel, unless you add parameters. And it’s not going to rectify the issue of bloated direct traffic visit metrics.
Agreed!! That’s why in our case we do all the parameter-adding and tracking for you (including conversion funnel from WOM). You give us the target URL (via shortener or sharing tools) and don’t have to worry about anything else. The reporting is all taken care of automatically.
Hi Annie, great post – three comments:
1) I’ve seen more and more backlash/concern with adding tracking string paremeters to shortners like bit.ly – have you seen any negative impact on that?
2) I haven’t looked but does the new Google url shortener pass link authority?
3) We (Optify) have a Twitter client built into our application and we automatically add tracking query string parameters to any link you build into our tweet, shorten it with your bit.ly account, and send out on your behalf through Twitter.
Thanks!
Awesome post, Annie. I don’t know that traffic that comes from apps and other mobile devices are counted as direct traffic so this is a new lesson for me. However, do you know how can we know which sources these direct traffic are from because it’s likely that in your post, you just mention how we can track traffic via referring sites.
Thanks, Mike. To answer your question, when you tag your links, you will choose the source when you assign a utm_source value. So links you put out on Twitter will come in as twitter if you set utm_source=twitter, whether they come in from a mobile app, the Web, or a desktop app. That way all of your data for a campaign will be consolidated in one place.
Thanks for the great post! This is always easier said than done, particularly in systematically managing the effort.
Hi Annie,
great post. Just one more questions and I hope Im not too late. Do you have connect Hootsuite somehow with your Google Analytics account so it creates the campaigns automatically?
I dont see how a campaign appears on my Google Analytics account just by chosing it in Hootsuite.
Thanks
Karina
Heyy Karina,
It’s never too late. Maybe if you commented like six years later. Then I might have to tell you the latest Apple hologram doesn’t support tags. But I digress (in a serious way …)
No, you don’t have to link your analytics account in any way. When you append the links that point back to your site with the appropriate tags, Google Analytics will grab those parameters and usher the values into the appropriate reports under Traffic Sources > Campaigns.
So let’s say you tweeted a link that pointed back to your site (we’ll say http://www.karinasawesomesite.com/funky-shoes). Hope you like funky shoes. Your URL (before you shorten it, of course) would look something like this:
http:// http://www.karinasawesomesite.com/funky-shoes?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social+media&utm_campaign=xmas+shoe+sale
When Google Analytics parsed the URL, it would recognize its parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) and put the values in those corresponding reports. So when you went into Traffic Sources > Campaigns, you’d see a campaign that says xmas shoe sale. (+ –> space)
Then you can change Campaign to Source or Medium or either of the other two parameters, if you used them. Or you can segment further by choosing on of the other parameters from the drop-down menu just to the right of the Campaign drop-down. Where it gets uber cool is when you have campaigns that span different mediums (like you promote your funky Christmas shoes via email or Facebook). Or you run a report that shows your revenue (or signups or whatever) that came from all of your social media campaigns and then segment that data bucket by source, so you are looking at how much revenue your company generated from social media but can easily see how much came from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, email, etc.
Annie
A fine disposition. For a start, I now understand how I’m getting so much ‘direct traffic’. As one of those ‘nervous nellies’ looking to implement a new website shortly, might it not be an idea to get a 3rd party (free) too to measure the stats as simply, at least in the early days, waiting one and a half days for the figures from google analytics is no fun.
Nah, you don’t need a bridge analytics platform b/c GA doesn’t take a day and a half to report data. Although it’s not real time (yet), you’ll start getting data within a few hours. And really reliable data within 24 hours.