Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool that allows you to track and understand the behaviour of visitors to your website, who they are and where they came from. It’s one of the most commonly used tools by digital marketers in every industry. It’s free and very easy to set up, which can sometimes lead us to think that all the information we could possibly need will just be in there automatically without any additional configuration required by us. However if you want to track Social Media traffic in Google Analytics effectively, there are a few things you should be doing to make sure you get the most out of your data.
One of the most useful reports in GA4 is the acquisition report, which shows us where visitors come from. This allows us to
Within the Acquisition report you can review key metrics for each source that your traffic came from. Find out more about using the Acquisition report here.
By default Google analytics relies on acquisition information being provided by the referring website and if that information is not passed correctly for any reason we won’t know where the traffic came from.
I’ve done analytics reports for clients which show no, or barely any, social media traffic, despite the client saying they’ve been running loads of campaigns and posting three times every day. This can be really demoralising to think they’ve done all that work and no one has clicked on the website links in any of their posts. And maybe that is the case, but often when I ask them which landing pages they were using for their posts we find that those pages have high levels of direct traffic that coincide with the posts. This can happen for a few reasons:
The main point of mentioning these reasons above is to show that with direct traffic it is very difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions, as we really don’t know where it came from. We can only guess.
Even if Google Analytics is able to identify that your traffic came from a social media site automatically, the only information you are going to get is what domain they came from and what they do once they’re on your site. If you want to test two posts with different captions for example, you need to give Google Analytics more information to distinguish between them. This is where UTM tracking comes in.
UTM parameters are short pieces of text you add to the end of a URL to help track where your website traffic is coming from.
They give you a control over what acquisition data appears in Google Analytics rather than having to hope Google Analytics will be able to figure it out for you.
They don’t change the page, but they help tools like Google Analytics understand the source, medium, and purpose of the visit.
They let you answer questions like:
UTM Parameters can be used in other marketing channels as well as social media. Email Marketing is another channel that GA4 struggles to identify as a source.
| Parameter | What it means | Example |
| utm_source | Where the traffic is coming from | facebook, newsletter, google |
| utm_medium | The channel or type of traffic | social, email, cpc |
| utm_campaign | The name of your campaign | spring_sale, product_launch |
| utm_term (optional) | Keywords used in paid search | wireless+headphones |
| utm_content (optional) | Different versions of ads or links | cta_button, image1 |
What you set as your source, or campaign is up to you, but it is important that you use them consistently. If one member of your team uses the source ‘facebook’ and another uses ‘facebook.com’ you’re not going to be able to track the data in one place.
For the medium attribute you are better off using Google’s expected format which include organic, social, email, affiliate, referral, cpc. All parameters are case-sensitive so be consistent with capitalisation. My recommendation is to keep everything lower case.
Hopefully these instructions were clear enough that you could now create your own UTM parameters and add them to your social media posts, but if not, there’s a tool that will do it for you. This Campaign URL Builder allows you to add your web address, campaign name and the source and medium of your post and it will generate the URL automatically for you to add to your post. Why not give it a try on your next post!
Now that you know how to make sure your Social Media source data is accurate, you can explore how to interrogate it in Google Analytics to find all sorts of interesting behaviour patterns among your Social Media followers when they visit your website. The Acquisition reports mentioned earlier are a great starting place, but they are by no means the limit to what you can find. Why not learn more about GA4’s custom report functionality and see what reports you could create. If you come up with any really interesting reports, we would love to hear about them.
If you would like further training on Google Analytics or help turning your insights into actions why not why not get in touch withdigital to discuss our web analytics service.
