How socially engaged is your audience? Find out with Google Analytics!

MoreVisibility - July 5, 2011

Phew! Have you been having a hard time following all of the recent Google announcements the past few months? Yeah, you’re not the only one feeling that way. It seems that every time you check the Google blog, your feed reader, or your mobile device, you hear about a new feature or product offering from the search giant.

In the last few months alone, Google has introduced:

• Google +1 button for search, websites, and AdWords
• An updated and more detailed company transparency report
• Google Webmaster Tools reporting in Google Analytics
• A new Google Analytics mobile report section
• A new Google “Black Bar” and improved design / experience
• Google Music: Music on the cloud
• The Google+ project: real-life sharing for the web

A few days ago, Google made yet another big announcement by introducing an improved way to track social interactions from your website within Google Analytics.

With some quick and easy customizations to the Google Analytics tracking JavaScript, you can now track Facebook likes, Twitter shares, and other social media bookmarklets that live on your site in this new social reporting section.

It’s even easier to view interactions for websites using the Google +1 button, because Google Analytics can automatically track +1’s on your site!

The next time you log-in to your Google Analytics account, you will find within the Visitors section a link to Social. Inside of the Social link, you’ll see three new reports:

– Social >> Engagement: A breakdown of what social interactions your website visitors have performed, including Google +1’s and any custom interactions, like Facebook likes. Visitors who don’t interact socially on your website will be defined as “Not Socially Engaged”.

– Social >> Action: The source and the action performed by a socially-engaged visitor. Likes, shares, follows, and more will appear in this report. You’ll also see metrics like Unique Social Actions and Actions per Social Visit to help you analyze on-site performance by socially engaged visitors.

– Social >> Pages: Each social action can be tied back to a specific page on your website that a visitor’s social interaction took place from. This way, you can assign additional value to pages that lead to high volumes of social interactions, or improve upon pages that don’t.

While this section is a great way to obtain deep insights on your social visitors, you should still tag your shortened URLs for Google Analytics, to track the interactions on shared items on social media websites that lead visitors back to your website.

Social reporting is available to all Google Analytics users, so get engaged with social today!