Where Does Google Analytics Fit Into Your Social Media Strategy?

For many marketers, Google Analytics is a popular element of their analytics toolbox. It provides key insights surrounding content marketing efforts and helps optimize websites and improves visitor to conversion ratios. Marketers can learn which demographic their content is targeting, where traffic is coming from, the amount of time spent on each page and what the flow of web traffic looks like at any given time.

For website data, Google Analytics is great. But for your social media efforts, it’s leaving you blind to some key metrics.

What most marketers fail to realize, is that Google Analytics is missing a critical piece of information: who has converted from a social post and from which social post the conversion occurred on. This is very important data that could drastically improve a brand’s marketing strategy, as most marketers would agree.

As most of us already realize, web visitors don’t usually convert on their first visit. For the majority it will take several visits to the company’s web assets before they finally leave their information to get through to gated content. This can get tricky to measure, especially when a good portion of social posts aren’t linking to the company’s assets, but rather to third party sites such as news outlets, blogs, and YouTube. Google Analytics is missing out on a lot of the social web traffic and isn’t capable of showing the real ROI of social media.

When in the realm of social selling, it’s important for marketers to know which leads have clicked through on which social post, how many posts they’ve clicked on, which pieces of content they’re interested in, etc. Understanding what interests a lead is an important aspect of any sales strategy – and one that Google Analytics doesn’t provide.

In order to more effectively target and convert social leads into prospects, marketers are augmenting their Google Analytics data with social monitoring tools. By utilizing analytics specifically designed to measure data most relevant to social, marketers can create a more informed and targeted social media strategy.

What analytics tools do you use to get a complete view of your customers and lead generation? Let us know in the comments!