It’s great to take advantage of the social side of Google Analytics – or is it? Quite revealing (August is a bad month to demonstrate this to you, as I’ve been a bit inactive, but there is still enough data to make it interesting) in what the statistics show about your blog’s interaction with the social networks, and this has spurred me to create new suitable remedies for this.
Once you’re into Google Analytics, look under ‘Traffic Sources’ in the left sidebar for the ‘Social’ link, and click on it to make the menu extend downwards. The resulting page-links are excellent if you are undertaking a social media campaign, as you will be able to track how the public is reacting to your efforts and how or where you need to make adjustments or revisions.
In this post we shall explore the ‘Sources’ link. You will be greeted by a graph:
which show peaks when there is a lot of social media interaction (if you mouse over, more details are revealed like dates and numbers, which can be tracked back to specific posts you have written or actions you may have put in place).
The idea is to get a lot more peaks at regular intervals, all relating to your marketing activities. It’s also quite interesting to compare the social visits (blue) with all the visits (orange), which shows the relationship your blog has with search criteria and social referral, or first time visitors versus returning followers and fans. I’d like to concentrate more on the latter, as marketing to warm leads is much easier.
Below this graph are details of where the social referrals came from:
and here LinkedIn has superseded Twitter – which is interesting to me! I have been using both platforms a lot longer than the others, but it’s nice to know where I should be concentrating to get more visitors. The pageview statistics are also revealing as well.
And finally when you click further down the left sidebar onto ‘Social Visitors Flow’, here is some more interesting information:
as here you will be able to view which posts attracted the most attention from which platform, and then what happened next – did visitors move onto other pages, or did they ‘drop off’ as Google Analytics so delicately describes it!
The concept of ‘what happened next’ will be my priority in the autumn (and will be revealed in more Magic Moments). It is very important to be able to guide your visitors through your blog so they go where you want them to. There are various persuasive tactics I am currently exploring to use within my new design and navigation, as I will want prospective customers to visit my new product pages. Visitors should have an enjoyable journey, effortlessly executed, throughout my blog to get as much information as they can. After all, the Fairy Blog Mother is an educational resource, and this blog needs to be able to share it as much as possible!
Sharing your blog is really sociable
Fairy Blog Mother
Blogs are meant to be shared. Interactive websites, as that what blogs are, should be seen as the hub of your business on the internet, as they are able to encourage your readers and visitors to interact with you on your own blog.
Blogs are perfectly designed to enable comments and feedback on what you have written, a chance to allow your audience to express themselves and share what they want to say. And the more interaction you get (and this means responding to your comments, perhaps even starting a conversation), the more likely the internet spiders will index this new content and raise both your visitor and search engine ratings.
But as well as comments, you need to encourage your readers to share your blog on social networking sites. This sharing encourages links, and links are like portals on the web, allowing access to visitors and spiders alike to enter your blog and read its contents. You shouldn’t be shy of encouraging links, because if they come from quality sources, they can boost your blog no end!
But first you need a method of sharing your posts, and that is done through RSS (really simple syndication, an American term that means putting it about in many different places at one time). Usually a blog’s theme will already have a RSS URL incorporated into the theme (template), located through the little orange square that signifies RSS. This provides a simple RSS URL like http://successnetwork.wordpress.com/feed.
This RSS URL will enable you to feed your newly written blog posts into your social networking profiles and your Twitter stream automatically as soon as they are published (all at once at the same time!). All you need to do is to set up the applications in each profile and add in the RSS URL and everything will just happen for you!
This self-sharing of your blog shouldn’t stop there, you need to encourage others to share for you too. You can add in applications that allow your readers to share your post into their social networking profiles and Twitter streams, all at a click of a button, and if they’re really technically minded they might share them in the social sharing networks like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Tumblr, Delicious and many more!
These sharing networks are primarily sites that thrive on their members sharing worthwhile posts with each other, recommending them to others, and voting on which ones they like the best. The most popular posts will result in more visitor traffic, and this activity and interaction will gain the attention of the search engine spiders to index these blogs, resulting in large peaks in your visitor stats and a lot of ‘retweeting’ and sharing on social networking sites.
As sharing is a nice, altruistic and caring thing to do, why not go out and share a blog post today, starting with this one?