Understand Google Analytics Metrics for Social Analytics

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If you are aiming to get your website rank higher on search, it is important to advocate the use of content marketing strategies and to use Google Analytics to obtain optimized results. There are many factors affecting your website structures and content is one of them. Content marketing is perhaps one of the most powerful search engine optimization tactics that a webmaster can use in order to build traffic and give a website maximum exposure to the search users. Content marketing also provides an essential influence in growing your social media network and you can measure your marketing success in combination with your content and social marketing strategies using social analytics.

Your website content and social media reach

The Google Analytics has robust features that can help digital marketers measure the engagement of their website content as relevant to their social media reach. There is a new feature on Google Analytics in getting real time data that gives you the ability to measure real time reports in order to make real time decisions for your digital marketing campaigns. The Real Time feature of the tool provides a subset of data consisting of three fields namely geographic location, content and traffic sources. For content publishers and digital marketers it is important to know what content on their website is gaining popularity as it happens in order to take an immediate action of optimizing the publication of that content in order to increase potential revenues from it.

The data gathered can help a marketer identify which specific social media channels that their content is popular and this offers the opportunity to identify where to exert their content marketing efforts to grow their social media reach. Generally, the Google Analytics displays the following report overview on the dashboard to help identify which specific social media marketing campaigns work for them:

• The number of page views of a content
• The total number of unique visitors on your site from social media network
• The returning and new visitors of a website content
• The active viewers of a specific page on your site
• The source of the social media traffic referring visitors to your site
• The keyword driven traffic coming from social media searches
• The geographic breakdown about your website visitors
• Aggregate page views in the last 30 minutes

Data sources for your content and social media marketing

The Google Analytics can monitor and measure the sources of your content traffic. An understanding about what these measurements mean can help you improve your content marketing strategies. You will know what aspect of your content is doing well and those that don’t engage your social media followers. Based on the data sources about your content traffic, you can assume the effectiveness of your content in engaging social media followers.

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• A low organic traffic rates on your content means that you need to improve your social SEO marketing tactics in order to attract more traffic to your site.
• A high organic traffic rates on your content indicates that your optimization campaign is effective and your keywords are performing well in generating traffic sources to your site across various social media platforms.
• A high direct source result indicates that people are already familiar with your business and that they are making a direct search for it from the search engine.
• You are undertaking an effective link building for your content when the Google Analytics reflect a high quality social media domains like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as your traffic referral sources.

Google Analytics measures your content engagement and social interactions

One of the important metrics that the Google Analytics can measure from your content is its engagement value to your content viewers. The analytics report will reflect how long visitors on your site stayed on any of your web page content, usually in increments of seconds, as well as on the number of page views. The content engagement of your site will help you understand whether your content marketing and content SEO strategies are effective and how you can further improve the results. By using this report, you will have a better idea on which of your content is relevant to your readers and you can focus more on writing similar content that will likely engage your website visitors.

Google measures the share value of your content as well. Content engagement does not only mean enticing people to become interested about your content. It is also regarded as a metric to measure the share value of your content. When more people share your content it is a good indicator that your content is relevant, useful and significant that is worth sharing. Among the metrics that the Google Analytics use when measuring your content engagement includes the bounce rate, length of page views and the landing pages coming from referring social media sites.

You can also use the social interaction feature reference on Google Analytics. This feature helps in measuring the social interaction level of your content. This provides valuable signal for the social engagement value of your content to your followers. Here is how to use the Google Analytics in measuring your content social engagement:

1. Use social media buttons to your content. There are embeddable buttons that you can display alongside your content that will make sharing of your content easier and convenient to your social media viewers.

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2. The popular social media buttons that you can use are Google +1, Twitter and Facebook like buttons. Make sure that these buttons are integrated to your Google Analytics account.

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3. Use the data model from the Google Analytics in order to measure three fields that are involved in the social interaction of your content namely the social network, social target and social action.

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4. Use the measurement feature of the Google Analytics to view the interaction of your content to your readers through the embedded social media buttons like the Twitter button as shown below.

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Digital Warriors has content search engine optimization experts that can help in building your content marketing success. They are professionals in the fields of IT consulting, marketing analytics, social media marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization and web design and development that can provide you a full package of digital marketing services.

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