How to Turn Google Analytics Into Social Media Results

This post is part 4/4 of a Twitter and social media etiquette strategy. See archives for parts 1-3.

One client of mine, a speciality retailer in Bothell, has been interested in expanding their social media presence and growing the number of websites who link back to their own – an important factor in organic search engine optimization.

To do this, I simply pulled a recent Google Analytics report from their SEM campaign and flipped to the ‘Referring Sites’ section. Google makes it easy – it ranks top referring sites, or those sites who sent visitors to your own site, in order of most referrals to least. The dashboard shows overall monthly referral activity, and looks like this:

The Google Analytics Referring Site dashboard shows which websites linked to your own in a specific time period, and how many visitors they sent overral.

As mentioned, Google provides a list of referring sites, in order of most visitors sent to fewest. That gives us a great starting point by which to begin a little social media research:

Google Analytics Referring Site List shows websites who have sent links back to your own site, a great starting point for any social media strategy.

The next step is to type in a Google, Twitter and Facebook search for the represented businesses and organizations (“Weed Patch Store Twitter”, for example). A search on the above businesses and organizations resulted in a great list of active Tweeps and Facebook users. From there, you’ll be ready to link back to them and make sure you’re keeping the conversation and linking consistent.

The Weed Patch store consistently links to my client's website, so we plan to link back to them consistently, as well as engage with them on their social media networks.

This simple practice ensures you a strong place in your local social media community. It also helps you use other business’ loyal fans and followers to your own advantage. As a metric, the client and I are hoping to see increased inbound links from these referring sites – a sign that even more interested visitors are finding your information and hearing your business message. Plus, it helps answer the question, “What should I tweet/post today?” as the list provides you with content from others you should be sharing.

Ready to add a new piece to your social media strategy? Installing Google Analytics to your site is easy – just make sure you remember to install the code on every page. Google Analytics sign up can be found at this link.

Sign up for Google Analytics to learn more about your website visitors, traffic and potential social media contacts and strategy ideas.

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