One cannot thank eConsultancy enough for publicising their experience of tweaking advanced segments in Google Analytics, to enhance the data granulation and to help us see Social Media sites on the chart. Previously, when we wanted to see and analyse visits from Social Media sites, we would do so via Referring Sites under Traffic Sources in Google Analytics. Now, in a few simple and quick steps, one can create a segment that will display just the data they need.
Over at eConsultancy you can read more about the experiment. In short, you can either create filters under a new website profile (but do not delete the main one!), or you can go via advanced segments. We chose the latter, since the data can then be accessed within the main website profile. So, as a matter of giving an example, here is how the things stand for ourselves and for one of our clients (the left and right images, respectively (or top and bottom, depending on how you are viewing this)):
What instantly comes to mind is that this cannot be a one-size-fits-all type of exercise, and it helps if you already have an idea about the Social Media sources that send you traffic. For example, eConsultancy does not include either Flickr or YouTube. We do not have a YouTube account, but we do use Flickr, and in the data capture from 1 January to 6 May 2009 Flickr has been the fifth traffic source for our site and blog.
Better still, building on eConsultancy’s experience, we created two separate segments for Twitter and Facebook, as these channels were consistently driving traffic since we have started using them, hence it was interesting to see the competition. We created two segments, one called “Twitter streams” with the following regular expression values: “twitter|tinyurl|bit.ly|tr.im|cli.gs”; and another called “Facebook”, with “facebook|new.facebook” as the regular expression value. See below the way this comes out in the chart (it also includes visits from Flickr):
Overall, since the beginning of the year, the traffic from these three sources – Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr – has accounted for 6.3 per cent of all visits to the blog. What our experiment shows is that similar segments can be created individually for other Social Media channels. In our case, this simply serves to graphically exemplify that, as far as Social Media and Networks are concerned, Twitter and Facebook are our most loyal traffic drivers so far. But when there are several competing channels, it makes every sense to create dedicated segments for them. What this will serve to do, is to better analyse the traffic and optimise the use of Social Media sites accordingly.
In addition, the value expression in an advanced segment field is limited to 256 characters. What could potentially be done, is all the Social Media traffic sources can be broken down to the ones that consistently deliver a lot of traffic and the ones that can be lumped together. For example, you would end up having segments for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and LinkedIn; and the “Other Social Media” segment would include traffic from all other sites that do send visits to your site or blog but in a less consistent, impressive or otherwise important way.
Finally, if you are still unfamiliar with how to track Social Media responses to your content with the help of a Greasemonkey script, here is the post by Erik Vold on UserScripts, to get you started: Social Media Metrics Plugin for Google Analytics.
And many thanks to @technicalfault and @mattorchard for discovering the story and bringing it to our eyes on Twitter.
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