Social Media track twitter in google analytics

Published on October 4th, 2011 | by charliesaidthat

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Twitter Tips: How to Track Clicks from Twitter in Google Analytics

How do you measure social media? It’s a big big topic, and one we won’t cover here. Baby steps. Here’s two ways how you can track links to your site from Twitter more efficiently in Google Analytics.

Track Clicks From Twitter With a URL Builder

One of the easiest ways to track your clicks from Twitter (and other social media channels) is to use Google’s URL builder so it tracks the clicks in your Google Analytics alongside other referrers.

However, as someone who runs multiple Twitter accounts it can be frustrating when trying to do more than a couple of links at a time. So this URL-Builder excel sheet should help you out, you can edit links in bulk. It also gives you a record of all links you have shared and a place to save your bit.ly links for later.

  • All you need to do is name your campaign, we tend to use something descriptive of the content you are sharing.
  • Name the medium, if you are sharing on Twitter or Facebook we recommend naming this “social media” so you can have all your social efforts collected in one place.
  • Name the source, which will most likely be the channel you are using such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, your blog etc.
  • Choose your links.
Then just copy the link output, as it’s probably too long to share you can use bit.ly to shorten it so it looks nicer. This way you can really track your click through in Twitter and place the traffic against your other referral techniques.



>> Download The URL Builder Excel Sheet

Track Clicks From Twitter With Advanced Social Segments

When you’re in Google Analytics you can use segments of your traffic. Which means you can lump together groups of your traffic into more meaningful buckets. Which is really useful for Twitter as it has so many refferal paths (e.g. Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, t.co etc.)

Because there are just so many different Twitter clients that appear in Analytics it’s important to account for them all in your social segment.

If you aren’t sure how to set up Advanced segments, SEOmoz have a great step-by-step post here about setting this type of segment up.

My pal, @dohertyjf also suggests some very sexy analytics segments that you may want to consider using.

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A big hat tip to Jared’s excel sheet for basing this awesomeness off of!
 

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About the Author

Hi I’m Charlie, a digital marketer with an interest in social media, SEO and understanding consumer behaviour. I enjoy creating conversation and finding ways to improve businesses through digital platforms. Feed me Cha Siu Bao. Connect with me on: Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Linkedin | or just Email Me  


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  • http://twitter.com/roballport Robert Allport

    Doesn’t seem to work if you enter in a url with two hyphens E.g. web-design-talk.co.uk

    • http://charliesaidthat.com/digital Charliesaidthat

      Hi Rob,

      How strange. I just tried that URL and the output works fine. What is the exact problem you seem to be having?

      Best,
      Charlie

      • http://twitter.com/ArtichokeRecipe Artichoke Recipes

        can give google analytics 4 specific URL’s (I have two twitter handles and two FB pages and would like to seperate the metrics? Any thoughts..? :)

  • Pingback: Yes Virginia, there is a Social Media ROI – Here are 4 ways to measure it | Semi-Geek Marketing

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