August 04, 2009

Social Media Optimization Google Analytics Filter

As social media marketing becomes more prominent for internet marketers one challenge is to determine how to track success of a social campaign. One easy way to gain some insight into your social media marketing campaigns is to setup a specific campaign in Google Analytics to track traffic from these sites. This will give you insight after you push social strategies online if they are bringing in more traffic to your website or not. Google Analytics already tracks visits from social sites but you can easily setup some filters to put them all together in one campaign so you can see the overall health of your social strategies without having to look at them individually.

Follow these steps in Google Analytics so setup social media marketing filters:

1. Click on ‘edit’ to the right of your website profile on the main login screen.
2. Click on ‘Add Filter’ in the ‘Filters’ section on the next screen.
3. Name the filter something like ‘Social Media Grouping’
4. Select ‘Custom filter’ as the ‘filter type’
5. Select ‘Advanced’ from the radio button options list
6. *In ‘Field A -> Extract A’ select ‘Campaign Source and enter the social media marketing sites you want to capture in the text box, see below for more information
7. ~In ‘Output To -> Constructor’ select ‘Campaign Medium’ or ‘Campaign Name’ and enter ‘social’ in the text box, see below for more information
8. Leave the rest of the ‘yes/no’ boxes as-is and save the filter
9. You will have to wait 24 hours to start seeing the traffic being filter in the manner you just setup

* Note: for convenience sake you can copy paste this text to add some of the most prominent social type sites on the internet to your filter: twitter.com|facebook.com|myspace.com|flickr.com|linkedin.com|Wordpress.com|blogspot.com|youtube.com|stumbleupon.com

~Note: this will change the ‘campaign medium’ from ‘referral’ to ‘social’. There is one drawback to this as you will not be able to see the referring website url from traffic coming from your tagged social media marketing websites anymore. There is an alternative to this. Instead of marking the campaign medium as ‘social’ you can mark the ‘campaign name’ as social. Then to see your social traffic you will have to go to ‘traffic sources’ -> ‘referring sites’ -> select a site -> filter by ‘campaign name’ to see your ‘social’ traffic.

Screenshot 1: Setting up the filter

Google Analytics Social Filter (above)

Screenshot 2: Viewing Social Site Traffic

Social Filter Website Traffic Screen

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