You may have 60,000 followers on Twitter but if this isn’t resulting in increasing your traffic you need to see why. I’ll be looking at that in part two but for now I’m going to show you how you can set up Google Analytics to work for you and track in one place how your social media is performing in relation to your other traffic sources – direct, search and other referring sites.

First thing to do once logged into your Google Analytics account is click on ‘Advanced Segments’ and add new segment.

Under ‘traffic sources’ you need to drag the button for ’source’ to the dimension or metric space. Change condition to ‘Matches regular expression’ then in the box next to it you want to add in all the Social Media you use like Twitter and Linked etc. separating each one like this twitter|facebook|linkedin. Once that’s done, name it and save it and your social media tracking is complete.

To view this in action head to your visitors overview. In the right hand corner above the graphs you can see the advance segments option. You can either tick your new customised segment and see just your visitors and page views received from social media or by ticking all visits as well you can see how this compares to the total traffic figures for the site.

Before setting this segment up you would have had to go to referring sites and look for each of the social media networks you’ve used but now you can get one figure for all those networks combined. By clicking traffic sources you can compare this with other referring sites, traffic received from search and what comes in directly, giving you a complete picture of your social media campaign performance.

The requirement from the client was to increase People Management’s presence in Google, to bring in more referrals from the search engine and also to use SEO and other traffic building techniques to increase the visitors to the website.

You can read about the work on the People Management project page.