A new semester is starting and I am back to teaching Social Media Analytics. This blog about teaching social media focuses on a blog project where students create a class blog, promote it on social media and then report on the associated analytics, including Google Analytics.  To read about this process from the beginning, start reading the blog from the link below this posting. (Zahay, 2021)

One of the best things about connecting Google Analytics to a blog in teaching social media analytics is that GA will give a report of where traffic is coming from in terms of which social media network and which posts are creating traffic. Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media Studios, Inc. recently outlined this process in a blog post listed at the end of this post (Crestodina, 2021).

Social Media Analytics from the Channels Report

An easy first step is to create a standard report by selecting Acquisition, All Channels, Traffic. An example of this report from my own blog is included here. I recently reposted a post from February’s blog to share with other professors teaching social media.    It is clear to see which channels are driving traffic and that social media is the largest source of web traffic to my blog, over 75 percent.  I can also see that this post attracted a number of new users to my blog.  While the bounce rate is high, as is usual for a blog, viewers did spend almost a minute reading the post, which was relatively short. For more insight, I can drill down in this channels report (Figure 1) to see which social media sites are driving traffic.

Figure 1: Google Analytics Channels Report Shows Most Blog Traffic Comes from Social

Using a Custom Report for More Details

Andy Crestodina also includes in his blog a link to a custom report your students can import into their own Google Analytics.  I imported the report into the GA for this blog on teaching social media analytics. This report shown here (Figure 1) outlines in more detail exactly which social media sites are driving traffic, in this case Facebook and LinkedIn.

Figure 2: LinkedIn and Facebook Drive Most Social Traffic to This Blog

The report also allows a drill down to the links generating traffic by clicking on the various social channels.

Figure 3: Most Recent Traffic Comes from A Single Blog Post

In my own blog, (Figure 3) I can see that most of the social media traffic is coming from that repost of an earlier blog post I made around the middle of August.  Students as they analyze their own posts can see that posting on social media helps drive traffic to the blog and how.

These Google Analytics functions that allow for exploring social media analytics are a good way for students to improve their blog by seeing which posts gain the most traffic and how engaged their readers are on the blog. Take a look at the project below in my blog and see more details from Andy’s blog post on getting the most about social media traffic to your blog by using GA reporting functions. Please note for this project we are using the Universal Analytics (UA) version of Google Analytics as not GA4.  We think that the reporting functions are better suited to a blog using the original Google Analytics functions and reports.

References

Crestodina, A. (August 18, 2021).  [Blog post] How to Use Google Analytics to Track Social Media:  Here are 5 Quick Ways

Zahay-Blatz, D. (January 8, 2021). [Blog post] Teaching Social Media Analytics Blog