Dashboard 61 – Social Media Dashboard
Who needs this Social Media dashboard?
- Everybody who uses social media to promote their site
- People who use social sharing buttons on-site
- Everyone who gets traffic from social media
Requirements
- Google Analytics must be installed
- Ideally social sharing buttons on-site will be tagged to send data to Google Analytics
- Values should be applied to each goal
How can this dashboard help you?
This dashboard contains 12 widgets of data that will help you understand how much social interation your website gets both on and off site. It includes:
+ Add this dashboard to your own Google Analytics profile
Widget contents and settings
This widget shows you how many visits your site has got from social media sites. Excluding any traffic that is not from social sites.
These are the sites that Google has identified as being social media sites, it combines the different URLs for each platform meaning you don’t have to create a really long advanced segment to pull out this data.
This shows the percentage of the total goal value that social sites have contributed, along with the actual value for each.
Here we see the social websites that have sent the most traffic to your site, shown as percentages in the pie chart with the numbers alongside.
This table shows the social platforms that sent the most traffic to your site and how many pageviews these visits generated.
If there is an image alongside the social platform it means that this platform is one of Google’s data hubs and more information will be available about the activity that happened on the social platform.
This graph shows the number of activities that happened on data hubs each day.
A data hub is a social platform that Google has the data for, including Google+, Reddit, Delicious and more.
This is a detailed list of the activities that happened on data hubs, showing the platform and activity on the left with the total number of activities specific to your website on the right.
Trackbacks is the term Google uses to describe links to your site on other peoples websites, such as mentions in blog posts.
Here we can see which pages of your website are shared the most on data hubs and the total number of visits to each page.
This shows the total number of social actions that happened on each page. Social actions are a measure of social buttons used on your website such as the +1, Like and Tweet buttons.
This is a graph showing the percentage that each data hub and activity contributed to the total data hub activity.
This pie chart shows you how loyal your social traffic is. Each segment represents the percentage of visits where the users made a certain number of visits to your website. In the example above it is clear that most visitors from social platforms only came to the site once. Social visits where a user came to the site 5 times only represented 1.32% of the total social traffic.
This widget shows you how much social activity happens on data hubs and interaction on site from social traffic by day of the week. 0 is Sunday and 6 is Saturday.
What to watch out for and how to use the data?
To find this data, follow these steps:
1. Open your Google Analytics account
2. Navigate to the Traffic Sources report
3. Open the Social reports section
4. Select Social Plugins
5. Above the table of data choose ‘Social Source and Action’
6. Check all the social buttons you have are reporting data here
The days of the week report shows you which days have been most successful, so you can monetize successful days even more and identify which days are quietest and whether you can do more on quiet days to see more interaction.
The goal value by social network pie chart shows which social platforms generate the most money for your site (through goals, not ecommerce). Looking at this data alongside the visits by social network you can identify which bring traffic and not value and those that have a high value compared to low visits.
This data should be used to help you decide which social platforms to invest time in and also which ones are not worth the investment to you.
It can also help you identify which platforms work naturally, as some may appear in the dashboard without you actively using them.
The social actions widget tells you which of your pages is the most shared from the buttons available on your website. Knowing this can help you decide on future topics to write about and also help you identify those which don’t lend themselves to social activity.
The data hub activities table shows which pages of your site are most shared, discussed and linked on other platforms. When marketing your site, getting this activity is very important, so this data is one of the most useful additions to the Google Analytics data. It is also good to see this data alongside visits to identify which pages have good results in both and which see activity but low visits or vice versa. Action can then be taken to improve results and create new content which will be equally or more successful.
+ Add this dashboard to your own Google Analytics profile
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Anna Lewis works as analytics specialist at the UK digital marketing agency Koozai.
Boost your Google Analytics knowledge by reading some of her blog posts.
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