If you’re looking to get a better idea of how well your social media marketing is performing, there are plenty of robust tools like Highperformr analytics suite for keeping track of things like your audience demographics, post engagement rate, and other metrics.
However, what happens once users click through to your website to find out more about your products or service?
Google Analytics (GA) is a popular tool for tracking the way users interact with your site once they enter through various marketing channels, making it a great way to build a clear picture of how well your social media campaigns are performing.
If you’re curious about the benefits of Google Analytics for social media, but you’re not quite sure of how to integrate it in your strategy, here’s four theoretical use cases to help you get inspired.
1. Assessing Highest-Converting Content with UTM Parameters
The Scenario
A company specializing in logistics software has an active content calendar covering a diverse range of content types, including product demo videos, commentary on industry news, and behind-the-scenes content. The company knows they’re getting engagement from social media, but their marketing team is having trouble discerning which kinds of content are leading to conversions.
The Method
Using UTM parameters, the marketing team sets up unique URL elements attached to browsing sessions from their social media marketing, allowing them to segment traffic based on their source, campaign, and content.
After implementing this feature, the marketing team is able to use the “Social” view of GA’s acquisition reports to see how session behavior differs depending on the content they used to reach the website. This, in turn, allows them to highlight the kinds of content that leads to valuable conversion actions, such as signing up for downloads or requesting quotes.
The Result
After discovering that long-form thought leadership pieces on LinkedIn generate more engaged sessions and conversions, the marketing team pivots towards publishing more of this kind of content, and finding ways to incrementally improve the quality of each piece. This leads to an increase in qualified leads who arrive at the website through social media.
2. Building a Better Understanding of Audience Demographics
The Situation
A cloud services consultancy has a large following on several social media accounts. Though their social analytics tools give them a good idea of audience demographics through engagements that begin and end on social platforms, they want to know how closely this reflects activity once people click through to their website.
The Method
The company starts leveraging Google Analytics Audience reports to develop a more detailed profile of the people who reach their website through social marketing channels, looking at their most “switched-on” sessions that originated on social media along demographic lines such as age, gender, and location.
This analysis reveals that content on X/Twitter tends to attract more clicks from a younger audience interested in educational content, correlating with their “junior IT executive” audience segment. On the other hand, people who reach the website through long-form LinkedIn content tend to be more senior.
The Result
The company adjusts their content calendar so that their X/Twitter feed has a greater emphasis on educational content aimed at younger IT professionals, and their LinkedIn calendar is populated by more case studies, industry reports, and other content likely to attract people in more senior positions.
This leads to increased shares by the former group, and an increase in qualified leads visiting their website.
3. Identifying Great Influencers
The Scenario
An app development company who specialize in creating online menus and ordering apps for restaurants feels like they’re not maximizing their reach on social media, and wants to expand into influencer marketing to generate more brand visibility.
Though there are a lot of influencers in the food and beverage niche, they want to make sure they’re partnering with the right one for their audience demographic and overarching goals.
The Method
The brand uses social listening tools to track online conversations around a few close competitors and certain keywords related to their industry, alongside Google Analytics Acquisition reports to identify the top-performing external websites that are driving referral traffic to their site.
By comparing the website content that’s linking to their website, and the top-performing social media content found using their social listening tools, the brand is able to identify commonalities between both content channels that correlate with higher engagement.
The Result
The findings from their content analyses produces a set of parameters they use to find influencers who are involved in high-engagement conversations on social media, particularly those who post content likely to generate referral traffic to the brand’s website. This leads to the launch of a successful influencer campaign that sees a rapid increase in visibility and click-through rates.
4. Calculating ROI
The Scenario
A cybersecurity tool provider puts a lot of resources into creating social media content across several platforms. Though they know their content gets a healthy rate of engagement on social media, they don’t have a reliable way of attributing the ROI from their organic social media marketing.
The Method
The company sets up conversion goals on Google Analytics that correspond with their main business goals, such as “free trial sign-up” or “contact form submission”, and assign monetary values to these. They then use these goals to create reports focused on traffic exclusively from their social media platforms.
With this GA setup, the company can not only see how much their social media is contributing to their profits compared to other marketing channels, but also which channels are generating the highest ROI.
The Results
After the reports have been running for a few months, the company can see that LinkedIn gives them the highest ROI out of all their social media platforms, while Instagram generates the lowest. They use these findings to divert budget away from their Instagram campaigns and put more efforts into their LinkedIn marketing, helping to build more engagement from audience segments most likely to convert.
Leveraging Google Analytics for Social Media
While purpose-built social media analytics can give you a good idea of how your top-of-funnel marketing efforts are doing, combining these tools with Google Analytics data will give you a more detailed and well-rounded view of how social media contributes to your business’s overarching goals. We hope these pointers help you as you work to develop your social media marketing and understand its place in your wider business strategy.
To get your engagement analytics, segmentation, and platform-specific strategy off to a great start, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
