How to track your traffic from social media with Google Analytic
Do you know which pages your visitors from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google Plus are looking at?
Do you know how long time they are staying on your pages? Which one of your social media has the highest bounce rate?
The traffic from social media is growing so fast these days – I have around 33 percent of the traffic to Seocustomer.com coming from social media.
So now it’s time to get some knowledge about our visitors from these sources.
So are you ready to take a Google Analytic trip here?
I want to show you how you can use Google Analytic to get all this information.
I will use my Twitter statistic but you can use Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn or any of your social media.
Referral Reports
This is the easiest way to keep track of your visitors.
Just log into your Google Analytic account – click Traffic Sources – Sources – Referrals Report. Easy right?
If you don’t see Twitter among the first 10 referrals, you just have to search “twitter”, using the inline filter you see at the top of the table above.
You can also use the advance segment. Click “+New Custom Segment”. Give your segment a name like “Twitter Segment”, and “include”, “source”, contain “t.co” (this is the referral link from twitter).
Now make another segment for your Facebook the same way.
Now you can select both your Twitter segment and your Facebook segment and all of your traffic.
Start by clicking your traffic sources, sources, all traffic to the left.
If you then click on the comparison view (at the arrow) you can get a picture like this one.
Now you can compare all your traffic with the two segments you just have made.
Here at SeoCustomer.com my bounce rate last month was 70 percent. The bounce rate from Twitter was 76 percent and from Facebook 73 percent.
It’s also very easy to compare visits, page/views, avg. visit duration and percent new visits. Handy right?
If you have a goal on your website (and you should always have that), you can check out which of the social media gives you most conversions.
Custom Reports
You can also track your visitors in another way on Google Analytics. If you want to know which pages are shown for your visitors from the social media this is the way.
I can show you how much traffic I get from Twitter, which pages the visitors have seen and how many are new visitors (you have choose between a lot of different dimensions and metrics).
So click on “custom reporting” at the top of your screen and “+new custom report”.
Here is the result
Not so much fun right?
If I want to see the landing pages from my twitter visitors. I just add a new dimension “landing page”.
And now you will see this report here:
So now I know which pages my visitors from twitter is looking at.
Standard Reporting
Now Google Analytic has also made a standard report about the social media traffic.
Go to “Standard Reporting“, “traffic sources“, “Social” and “sources“. Then you will see this next image – where you also can check out the pages viewed
And remember if you what to know which companies are visiting your site and which pages the individual companies are looking at. I have an article for you right here. Getting B2B leads from Google Analytic and Boost Your Sale Now.
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Take care out there, Henrik











I never really understood the Google Analytics mechanism. You’ve put it all up in a very impressive manner, I think I’m getting the hang of it now
Thanks for sharing.
One of the best tools for me .. is Google Analytic… its really amazing the information you can get from that… I love it… lol… all the best to you Faitma, Henrik
This is such an effective way to look at the bigger picture and at the same be able to address the areas that we need to work on accordingly. So far, my fan page and ads on Facebook have helped me immensely in terms of traffic generation based on the results I have garnered through Google Analytics. Thanks for sharing!
Hello Joy…. thx for your comment. And yes I hope everybody is using some kind of analytics on their site… without analytic you cant really do a good marketing job
, all the best Henrik
I’m still on the planning stage of setting up my own blog and I’m kind of scared of the perils of online marketing. Thanks for sharing this useful post1
Good luck with your blog Veronica.. send me a link when its online
Henrik
I always doze off at the talk of SEO and traffic generation. But your article rocks, so thank you for this one, and I’ll be looking deeper to the topic.
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Thx Kelly… if you just like them half as I do writting them … lol… all the best to you, Henrik
Google Analytics is such an amazing free tool! I make it a point to take full advantage of all its features by keeping track of my online marketing activities on social media platforms as well. Thanks!
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hello Emilia… it really is an amazing tool.. and I love it lol… have a great day out there, Henrik
I mean, wow, you make Google-Analytic utilization stress-free and easier. Thanks for this one!
Wouldn’t it be nice if there are more and more informative bloggers like you? This is a very useful post especially for those newbie bloggers who are still in the dark!
Hello Sandra.. thank you, Henrik
Hey Henrik,
Your way of presenting the usage of Google Analytics for Traffic from Social Media is so easy to understand and grasp. This will really help us as from now we can actually read the traffic and figure out which sections and platforms to be worked on
Thank you, I am glad you like it… all the best, Henrik
Nice article. And an informative one too. Thanks for sharing!
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