Easy Social Media Segmentation

With the growing influence of social media as a traffic source to websites, Google has introduced a new set of social reports to Google Analytics which can help marketers understand the social impact on their website. While these reports do offer some new metrics like social interaction, they are somewhat silo’d from other Google Analytics reports which still use the standard mediums of cpc, referral, organic and direct. That means that unless you are tagging all your social links properly (which you should be endeavoring to do, see our post on link tagging here) you won’t be able to compare your social traffic in the other Google Analytics reports….or will you?

This is where advanced segments come in. Fortunately, untagged social links will generally fall into referral traffic which has a recorded source (this is unlike email which will either go to direct or referral traffic making it critical to tag effectively). This means that we can create advanced segments which group all the most common social sources (and correctly tagged medium=social/social-media) into a segment.

With this segment you will now be able to segment and compare channels in your non-social reports as shown below in the traffic sources report. One thing to bear in mind though is that comparing your new social media segment with the standard referral segment will in effect be double counting, as your social segment will overlap with the untagged social referrals. Hence you will need to have another advanced segment to show all referral traffic excluding social sources.

You might be thinking this seems like a lot of work, and wondering where you should begin. Don’t worry we’ve done all the heavy lifting for you and created the two segments which you can simply just click and paste into your account. All you have to do is click on the links below while logged into your Google Analytics account and when you are prompted to, select a profile to add it to (you can always share it later among all your profiles in the segment settings).

Click to Copy the Social Media Segment

Click to Copy the Referral Excluding Social Media Segment

The above segments are based on the most common social networks, social tools and link sharing services we could find, which you can add to or remove from (to segment just one or two social networks) as you see fit. If you would like some more help on setting up advanced segments you can always contact us for some expert assistance.

Please note while these segments have been tried and tested, it is your responsibility to verify they are working correctly in your account.