It’s always been a challenge to measure social media, since activity can occur both on and off your college website. Google is hoping to address this problem by releasing a new set of social reports within Google Analytics.
These new social reports are an exciting prospect for education marketing departments, since they will bridge the gap between social media and the metrics important to your college or university. This will help you measure the full value of your social media platforms (and, one would think, the platform that is most beneficial to your marketing and recruitment needs).
More specifically, the new Google Analytics Social Reports can help your school:
- Identify the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions
- Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs
Best of all, though, is that these new social reports will give you the chance to analyze this information together in one place, providing a much more complete picture of your share of social media voice.
The reports involve a number of features, including:
- An overview report (which provides social performance and impact on conversions)
- A conversions report (indicating what goals are being impacted by social media)
- Social sources (showing how visitors from different sources behave)
- Social plugins (indicating most shared content)
- Activity stream (showing you what’s happening outside your website)
Here is a screen shot of the overview report from the Google Analytics Blog:
As you can see, the breadth of the new offerings can really help your college get a handle on its social media output, impact and strategy.
The new reports will be available for all users over the next few weeks in the Standard Reporting Tab.
What do you think?
