Suppose you have pages on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as given below:
· www.facebook.com/mysoftware
· http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=12345&trk=at_side_k
· http://www.twitter.com/mysoftware
· http://www.facebook.com/pages/oursoftware/123456
· http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=12345
· http://www.youtube.com/user/mysoftwareanalytics#grid/user/5A123D2B
· http://www.flickr.com/groups/12345@B23/
You are doing social media marketing through above sources for following website:
http://mysoftware.com/
If you already have implemented any web analytics tool for given web site correctly then you are able to see that you are getting traffic from the following referrals such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and report will look like this:
Referrals
|
Visits
|
Page Views
|
Bounce Rate
|
www.facebook.com
|
874
|
1224
|
30%
|
www.twitter.com
|
745
|
934
|
55%
|
www.linkedin.com
|
832
|
1324
|
40%
|
www.flickr.com
|
214
|
234
|
89%
|
Here we are able to know only the source as referrals but are we sure that all the traffic has come from your community on Facebook (for example)? No.
When we drill down to the report for www.facebook.com it will depict following:
It means that the visitor came from Facebook has entered on the page www.mysoftware.com/newsoftwares .
The reason behind it is you have given a link of www.mysoftware.com/newsoftwares page somewhere on FB and visitor clicked on it and comes to your website. Also you are not sure that these are your efforts or not. Web Analytics tool will not tell you that this visitor is from your FB community. We need to use our own way to find it out. Tool will track the urls that what we set for visitors.
If you would like to know that how many visitors are coming exactly from those sources you activated on different social sites, you add url parameters to your website url before giving any link on any of the social site.
For example if I add ‘smm=mysoftware’ to my link url such as www.mysoftware.com/newsoftwares?smm=mysoftware then whenever visitor clicks that url or its tiny url link it is been tracked in web analytics tool and you will get to know that these are your efforts only. When you will drill down the referral report it will differentiate your efforts and it will show in the report as below:
Try it out and let me know your thoughts. I tried it successfully for my web site.
