Social media marketing is a great way to pull visitors to your site, but without relevant data it is difficult to determine how much revenue you are generating from social channels.
Basic data analysis allows you to measure traffic and even analyse which titles are attracting attention and what type of content is being shared.
But how do you know the money you are spending on social media marketing is being recouped in sales conversions and which campaigns are driving revenue?
The first step to take to measure revenue from social media networks is to integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics. If you do not know how to do that, you can find more information from Google’s AdSense Help.
Running revenue research
The data you can recover by combining AdSense with Analytics is much broader than tracking revenue, but for the purposes of this article, we will concentrate on metrics that enable you to pull profit data and set up a system of data analysis.
A good place to start is to determine which of your social media networks is the most effective. You can do this by opening up your Analytics dashboard and clicking on the “behaviour” tab in the sidebar to the left.
If you host more than one website in Google Analytics, obviously you need to select the website you want to track data on first. In the behaviour tab, you can recover metrics from AdSense.
To identify how much traffic you are getting from your social media networks, select AdSense Referrals. This gives you a list of all platforms which drives traffic to your site – it is not limited to social media networks.
The data from this page will help you determine which social media networks are working for you the most. You should also consider the amount of time spent on each however.
Given managing several social media accounts is time-consuming, this data will enable you to make some decisions. Do you drop a social site or two and save money and resources to put elsewhere, or do you step up your marketing campaigns.
Which content works for you?
The next step is to determine which content is the most effective for you. To pull this data go back to “behaviour” click on AdSense, then AdSense Pages.
This list gives you a much cleaner view of your content and enables you to identify which titles are attracting the most engagement. To break it down even further, moving forward you can make custom reports with your own titles, such as “Revenue from Social Networks.”
By creating customised reports you can create a virtual filing cabinet of information right inside your Google analytics accounts. This will cut down reams of mind-blowing data into streamlined data you can gather at a glance.
If AdSense is an income stream, using Google Analytics to record and analyse this data will help you to plan a social media marketing campaign more precisely, otherwise you could be throwing money into a slot machines that rarely pays out.
