How Much Traffic Comes From Social Media?

It’s helpful to measure how much of your traffic is coming from the various social media platforms.

This information will help you decide how to get the best return from your social media activity.

Here’s a quick method to measure traffic from social media using Google Analytics.

Let’s say I’ve been promoting something on my website and I’d like to see how much traffic came from social media.

For example, I want know how much traffic my page with reviews of Chris Abraham’s “A Midummer Night’s Dream” received from social media.

Track social media traffic to your website

Log into Google Analytics and open up the Behavior tab on the left sidebar menu. Scroll down to Site Content, then to All Pages.

Now you’ll see data for the most popular pages on your website.
(If the page you’re looking for isn’t shown in the top results, type the URL into the search bar. When it shows, click on it to bring up data for that page.)

In the image above you’ll see that the “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” page had almost 3,300 pageviews during the week of May 27 – June 3.

Below, I’ve clicked on the url for a the page “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

As seen above, find the Secondary Dimension button and click on it. Open Social from the drop-down menu and choose Social Network from the options.

You’ll then see a screen with your results.

Look at the Twitter and Facebook rows to see how much traffic came from each.

Twitter drove 480 pageviews – 15% of the total traffic to that url.
Facebook drove 100 pageviews – 3% of the total traffic to that url.

Knowing which platform brings you the most traffic will help you decide where to spend your time on social media.

You can take the research further and drill down to measure conversion rates (ticket sales), etc., provided you’ve set up these parameters in advance.

To set up these metrics on Google Analytics, have your developer look at this page from Google Developers “Social Interaction – Web Tracking (ga.js)“