Social Reports – New Google Analytics Feature

Recently Google revealed some new social reports within Google Analytics. This can help us to measure the real value of a social channel. Social Media is becoming more and more an important media channel that marketeers can use to engage with their customers. This means that it’s more important that those investments can be measured, this will allow us to calculate the real ROI.

The social report within Google Analytics focusses on 3 things:

• Identify the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions
• Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs

Overview Report: see social performance at a glance and its impact on conversions

The Overview report allows you to see in a nutshell how much conversion value is generated from your social channels. The Social Value visualization compares the number and monetary value of all your goal completions against those that resulted from social referrals – both as last interaction, and assisted.

A visit from a social referral may result in conversion immediately or it may assist in a conversion that occurs later on. Referrals that lead to conversions immediately are labeled as Last Interaction Social Conversion. If a referral from a social source doesn’t immediately generate a conversion, but the visitor returns later and converts, the referral is included as an Assisted Social Conversion.

Social Sources – find out how visitors from different sources behave

The Social Sources report shows engagement and conversion metrics for each social network so you can see how people are interacting with your content and whether it’s leading to a desired outcome.

For example, if you run social campaigns that promote specific products, you can see via the Social Visitor Flow whether visitors from each social network entered your site through these product pages and whether they continued on to other parts of the site or whether they exited.

Activity Stream: what’s happening offsite

While the other reports show you the impact that social engagement is having on your site, the Activities Stream tab (located within the sources report) shows how people are engaging socially with your content offsite across the social web.

For content that was shared publicly, you can see the URLs they shared, how and where they shared (via a “reshare” on Google+ for example), and what they said. Currently, activities are reported for Google+ and across a growing list of the Social Data Hub partners. We need to remark that the Facebook conversation data is not shared with Google.

Do you need help to set up your social reports? Don’t hesitate to contact us for more help on your Google Analytics.