A Social Media Dashboard for Google Analytics | Syed Alaudeen | Online marketing consultant Chennai

Social Dimensions & Metrics: Foundation for the Dashboard

To build a social dashboard you use the social dimensions and metrics. These are the same dimensions and metrics that generate the Google Analytics social reports. Here’s a quick overview:

Data Hub Activities: The social data hub is an open data collection platform. Any social network can send their social activity to Google Analytics. This metric is the total data hub activities for a given site.

Social Network: This dimension is a list of all the social networks that drive traffic to a site. These networks are automatically identified by Google Analytics.

Social Source Referral: This is a simple flag that indicates if the traffic source is from a social traffic source. This dimension is very useful if you want to create a widget that just contains data for social media.

Social Source & Action: This dimension is the name of a social network and an action that is specific to that social network. This track social sharing ON a site. GA will automatically track social interaction with Google + tools but needs to be configured to track other social sharing tools.

Social Entity: This is a URL that shared via social media. It’s any URL from your site.

Social Type: This is a simple boolean that indicates if a visitor is socially engaged, meaning they used a social sharing tool on your site. GA will automatically track social interaction with Google + tools but needs to be configured to track other social sharing tools.

The Social Media Dashboard

I’ve divided the dashboard into three sections: Off-site activity, On-site activity and Conversions/Outcomes. This makes it easy to evaluate user activity throughout the conversion process.
Feel free to download the Social Media Dashboard for Google Analytics and customize it.

It's easy to create a social media dashboard in Google Analytics.

Offsite Activities

This section is about what happens off of the site and some of the attributes of traffic that comes from social.
First is some basic context: total visits to the site. This puts all of the social data into context. You can quickly gauge when looking at a widget if social is a large or small percentage.
Next I wanted to get an idea of new traffic from social. So I included the % New Visits metric segmented for traffic from Social. When looking at this metric it’s a good idea to remember your social strategy. Are you trying to attract a new audience from social or trying to bring people back to the site? Your strategy will drive the context for this metric.

%New Traffic from Social Media

Now a widget to trend traffic and bounce rate from social. Here I can see how traffic from social changes over time. And we can use the total number of visits to the site to put this data into context. I also have bounce rate in this widget to gauge the quality of the social traffic. Do these people stick around or take off quickly?

A trend of traffic and bounce rate from social sources. How much traffic do you get from social and does it engage with your site?

The next widget is a plot of Social Data Hub Activities and Site Visits. I like this plot of offsite activities and site traffic. It’s a quick way to identify if any offsite actions resulted in traffic to the site. Many times with social media the activity happens somewhere else and there is no impact on the site.

Remember, this is activity from the social data hub partners, not the entire world of social media.

A plot of Google Analytics Data Hub Activities vs. Site Traffic. Is there any correlation?

Now let’s get a bit more specific about which social sources are driving traffic to the site. The final widget in this section is the top social sources based on their traffic. This is a classic segmentation of source. And I’m using bounce rate as a gauge to determine if people stick around or leave immediately.

This widget lists traffic from the most popular social networks. It also uses bounce rate an a gauge of quality from each network.

On-site Social Activities

Moving on to on-site activities we can include a number of things. Onsite activity is about what content people are interacting looking at and content that people might share using some type of social button (Google +1, Tweet, Like, etc.) This is a good way to understand which social networks people like to share content on.

A widget that measures on-site social actions. This shows how people are sharing content on your site.

I also like the value of visitors that are socially engaged. This segment of traffic is those that perform some type of social activity, like share using a tweet but or +1 button. I think a lot of people are trying to increase the sharability of their content. It leads to more traffic and, hopefully, more conversions. I would look for this metric to increase over time, depending on the tools that you give your visitors to share content.

Are those that engage socially on a site worth more? If they are, can you somehow increase social activity?

Another way to look at social sharing is to focus on which content people share. And we can do that using a widget with the Social Entity dimension. I find that it’s important to consider how you are promoting content when looking at this widget. It may be that you are constantly promoting certain content.

Which content gets shared on social media? This Google Analytics widget is a list of pages that get's shared on social media.

Another widget is the social traffic segmented by mobile device. Social and mobile are intimately connected. So much social content is consumed on various mobile devices. The goal of this widget is to get an understanding of which devices are popular with social users.

I like to view social traffic based on mobile devices. Is one device more popular than another? Are certain social actions popular on certain devices?

Outcomes & Conversions from Social Media

The last group of metrics focus on the outcomes from social. It focuses on goals and ecommerce (if you’re an ecommerce site). This is where you’ll probably need to adjust some of the widgets based on your goal configuration.

It starts with the value of traffic from social. I like the Per Visit Value metric. It’s a good way to compare the economic impact of different sources of traffic. It’s a single number that puts a value on traffic from different places. Some good context for this metric is the amount of effort (i.e. time and money) you spend to generate traffic from social. Do you employ a “social media guru?” If so, how much do you pay them, and how does this translate into revenue?

Measuring the per-visit-value provides an easy way to compare the value of different traffic source. How does social media compare to other sources for your site?

Now revenue! Here’s a simple widget with the revenue from various social sources and the per visit value for each source. Keep in mind which social networks you are focused on and the effort you put into each.

Tracking revenue from your social sources is critical. Are you getting a return on your investment?

NOTE: The one thing that I wish I could add to the dashboard is the Assisted Conversions metric for social. So often social media influences conversions higher up in the funnel. Unfortunately you can’t add the Assisted Conversions metric to the dashboard.


Now for more outcomes: conversion rate for various social sources of traffic. Remember, you’ll need to configure this widget to reflect your specific goal configuration. And you can certainly add more widgets for your various conversion activities. I’m just measuring the conversion rate for people reading an article.

Here's the conversion rate for various social sources. You can change this widget based on your goal configuration.

What would you put on a Google Analytics social media dashboard?

Remember, this is a shared dashboard, so you can add it to your Google Analytics account. You can keep it as-is or modify it to meet your needs.