Shareaholic automatically and seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics to provide sharing statistics right within your Google Analytics dashboard. This article aims to provide you with some resources for how to find and use this data to measure your site's impact across social media.
IN THIS ARTICLE
For instructions on how to enable Google Analytics UTM Campaign Tracking, as well as Social Interaction Analytics, so you can see how many clicks your social buttons are getting, please refer to this article.
What are UTM Parameters
UTM Parameters (sometimes referred to as UTM codes) are short text codes added to a URL, which enable Google Analytics to track important data about website visitors and traffic sources. These short tracking codes can give insight into higher-level concepts, like on which social media platforms your site is performing best, as well as a smaller details, like which specific posts are driving significant traffic to your site.
There are five different UTM parameters:
- Campaign Source, which indicates the social network, search engine, or other source driving the traffic (eg "email", "social network").
- Campaign Name, which can be used for keyword analysis.
- CampaignMedium, the advertising or marketing medium, or the kind of content being shared (eg "facebook", "twitter")
- Campaign Content, which can be used to distinguish between two similar URLs (useful when doing A/B testing)
- Campaign Term, which can be used to track paid keywords.
If you're wondering what UTM stands for, it stands for "Urchin Tracking Module." The name comes from the Urchin Software Company, which was one of the original web analytics developers. Google acquired Urchin in 2005 to create Google Analytics, and retained the "UTM" abbreviation for this feature.
Why use UTM Parameters
UTM parameters offer invaluable and unique insight into a possibly unnoticed world of data. By tracking how and where your site's pages are shared across social media, you'll be able to more effectively study the ROI (return on investment) of social media marketing campaigns, as well as hone and adjust your strategies to focus on the right platforms and the right posts. You can use this information to track overall traffic, conversion rates, perform A/B tests, and more. The possibilities are endless!
How to Enable UTM Parameters for Share Buttons
With our seamless Google Analytics integration, Shareaholic makes it quick and easy to enable UTM parameters for your share buttons. You can also customize the Campaign Source and Campaign Medium parameters from their default values to match your own marketing campaigns. For detailed instructions on how to find and enable the UTM parameters on Shareaholic for your site, please read this article here.
Where to Find the Data in Google Analytics
First, log into your Google Analytics account, then follow these steps -
- 1. In the reporting tab on the left side, go to Acquisition, then Campaigns.
- In your list of Campaigns, click on the one titled "Shareaholic" to view the data gathered from your Shareaholic Share Buttons.
- After clicking on Shareaholic, you'll be able to see a breakdown of the traffic to your site from links shared via the Shareaholic share buttons on your page. The "Source/Medium" column indicates from where this traffic originated (eg "socialnetwork/Facebook" indicates users that came from shared posts on Facebook)
Where to find the Social Interactions Tracking data in Google Analytics
If you've enabled Google Analytics' Social Interactions Tracking, you'll be able to view data about the number of clicks the Share Buttons have received on various posts. You can access this data through your Google Analytics dashboard by following these steps:
- From your Google Analytics dashboard, go to Acquisition> Social > Plugins
- This Social Plugins page will show you which posts/URLs have received the most "Social Actions," meaning the number of users who have clicked on the social share buttons from that post. To view the breakdown by Social Network, select Social Network as the Primary Dimension:
