With the rise in businesses starting to venture into the realms of social media how can you actually start measuring the benefits of all the posts and information being put to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIN. The rise of the ‘Add This’ button and Facebook Likes needs to be tracked effectively.
These tools are growing in usage and the inclusion of social sharing tools to products and pages within websites are becoming key traffic generates due to the spread of information across a clients social network.
Typically tagging the links placed on the various networks using the Google URL builder assisted with tracking but can be a bit of a pain going and running every URL through the tool. This however only dealt with traffic coming into the website from other sources, what about when the content is shared from your website.
To ease the pain Google have introduced a Social Engagement section within Analytics, which should if used correctly show where your site has been +1’d or Facebook Liked or shared to Twitter.
Following various links, I found the page on the AddThis website detailing how to get this working for those of use who make use of there very good Social Media Widget. It all seems farily straight forward and hopefully in the necxt 24 hours I’ll start seeing the date being tracked. A small insertion of code into the page and away you go. The only downside to the article is the lack of exactly where to put the code. I went for the bottem of the header section and only time will tell if I’ve done it correctly.
The code is fairly straightforward – just a few lines…..
<script type="text/javascript">
var addthis_config = {
/* your GA property ID goes here: */
data_ga_property: 'UA-123456-1',
/* set to true to enable social tracking
data_ga_social : true
};
</script>
If you don’t use the ‘AddThis’ tools then you can create your own links using the event method within your website for tracking through to Analytics, the support documents can be found here.
