I’ve decided to get scientific for this tip and let you know how to track clicks, not just from general social referrals but from specific tweets/statuses via your Google Analytics platform.
Let’s set the scene: you run a string of hotels called, let’s say, ‘The Stable’ and over the Christmas period, competition with other hotels is fierce so you are already upping your marketing effort, including extra social media activity.
How can you distinguish between traffic that comes to your booking page on the website as a direct result of your marketing output versus passing social trade?
If you use Google Analytics, you will have noticed that there is a section dedicated to social referral, so this info is ready to be plucked for your ROI reports. However, if you build a simple query string with the links you post onto your social channels, you will give Google extra info which will allow your reports to specifically reference a tweet.
For example:
- www.noroomattheinninn.com/bookings/ (your website landing page)
- ?utm_source=christmastweet1 (what tweet/status the traffic is coming from)
- &utm_medium=Twitter (which medium the traffic is coming from)
- &utm_campaign=stablehotelxmasoffer (campaign name)
Add these together and use a tiny URL platform like bit.ly to neaten the code up visually and voila, Google will display the campaign “stablehotelxmasoffer” as specific social referral from Twitter.
Whenever you use this URL, Google will record the data so you can track exactly what direct traffic you get from your promotional tweets.