Speaker 1: Hi, this is Andy Cresta Dina from Orbit Media Studios. It's time to start using GA4 and to use it to find insights, to take actions, to make better decisions as marketers. I'm going to show you now how to use the new version of Google Analytics, GA4, to measure traffic from social media, which is a really important thing to do because social media is one of those channels where you can spend a lot of time and energy for mixed results or for uncertain outcomes. Ready? Here we go. How to measure traffic from social media using GA4. Let's jump in. Okay, so here we are in Google Analytics. We're going to measure total traffic from social media by going to the traffic acquisition report. And this report by default has some interesting metrics, users, sessions, engaged sessions, count, or total revenue. These are not my favorite metrics. So the very first thing to do when looking at a Google Analytics GA4 report is to customize the report to get the metrics that you want. So that's going to be the pencil up here. Do that before you do anything else, such as change the primary dimension or add filters or add comparisons, because when you customize the report, it will blow out all of those little other things you did with the report. So first I'm going to click on the pencil and I'm going to choose different metrics. These are actually my favorite metrics. I'm going to leave users and sessions, but put engagement right next to that there at the top. And then I like to see conversion rate. So I'm going to click to add a metric and I'm going to type in conversion. It's going to be session conversion rate, they call it, which is, I'm going to put it up here at the top. Event count sometimes can be useful. I'll put that up there too. I don't know, average engagement time. And then click apply. Now we're going to click save. You're going to change these reports all the time, so don't really overthink this. I'm just going to save the changes to the current report and click save. You sort of have to click save three times in GA4. Then we click on the back to go back to the report. And so now I want to see just organic social, which is right here. Here's the line. That's top line traffic. Over this date range, let's grab a little more data, go back and get to a longer date range. Put this away and zoom in a little for you. Going back a few months and I can see organic social traffic had this amount of visitors, this number of visits, as in users and sessions. This is the likelihood that they engaged, as in saw more than one page, spent more than 10 seconds, or converted. Over here is the conversion rate. You can see it relative to the others. Very useful. Now we've measured top line social media traffic. Let's go down to a more interesting question to see which specific social channels are sending us traffic and what does that traffic look like. For this, I'm going to use the same exact report customization. I'm staying in the same report, which is the Acquisition Traffic Acquisition Report. But I'm going to change the primary dimension right here from Session Default Channel Group to let's use Source, Session Source. Medium is the broader origin of traffic, such as social media. Source is the more specific source of traffic, such as LinkedIn or Twitter or a specific campaign. So I'm looking at Session Source. Now I can see all the Session Sources, but some of these are not social, like Google. So I'm going to add a filter to only show me the social sources. So for that, I'm going to click to add a filter. The filter here is going to be for ... We could use Medium. We could also use Default Channel Group. In this case, I'll just use Session Medium. Start typing Medium. You can use first user Medium, which would be the first time that that person, or really the cookie on their device, came to the website. But I'll use Session Medium just for the last visit, the current visit that led to this traffic. And look, I get little check boxes here, so Social is just one of these. That's one of those nicer things about GA4 than Universal Analytics. Now I click Apply, and it will show me just the social sources, or when Medium was social. Some of these may be campaigns, such as this one right here. Some of these may be actual websites, such as Twitter right here. So now I can see, actually quite interesting, relative to each other, the ability of each of these social networks to attract visitors, users and sessions, to engage visitors, engagement rate or average engagement time per session, or the session conversion rate. Fun, right? Okay. The next question that we're going to answer is, which blog posts are getting the most traffic from social media? This is going to be a way to measure the performance of our content marketing. So for that, we're going to use a different report. I'm going to go to an engagement report, Engagement, Pages and Screens, because we said, which blog posts, right? Which articles? Which URLs from our content program? So what most people will do for this is choose the page path in Screen Class. This is sort of the equivalent of the URL. So when we come in here to Page Path in Screen Class, this is the path so you can see. Some of these are blog posts and some of these are not. Okay. But I only want to see which blog posts are attracting visitors from social media. So for that, I'm going to filter this just to show blog. All of our blogs are in a common directory, which makes analytics very easy to use. You can just type in a search query here and see just the blog. Sort of the way you would have done universal analytics with a filter. But now I want to see just people that come from social media. This is people that come from anywhere. And then for that, I'm going to add a filter. For this filter, I can add, for example, again, Session Medium. Include when the medium, Session Medium, contains social. So now I'm just looking at the traffic to the blog post when that visitor came from social media. Those articles had varying amounts of traction. Here's one that has a 41% engagement rate. Here's one that has a 28% engagement rate. So quite a bit of variance. Next, which social media campaigns are attracting and converting visitors? Slightly different question. Which campaigns from social media? These might be paid. These might be organic. These might be like a link you give to an influencer. Now when you're tracking a campaign, it's literally a campaign because you took the link of the landing page. So for example, here's an article, blogger survey. If I want to drive traffic to this, I want to put it into a campaign URL builder. We built one on our site. These are everywhere on the internet. They're all free. It's just a way to append to the end of a link campaign tracking code. We've got another video about that, but just for now, I'll show very briefly. You put in the link. You choose the campaign source, which in this case might have been LinkedIn. The campaign medium might have been social. The campaign name might have been blogger survey, February, whatever the case. Now this link, the parameters at the end of this link is how Google Analytics knows that visitor came from that source and that medium and that campaign because it can see, analytic can see the address. So whatever we put in there for the campaign name is literally going to appear in the report in Google Analytics when we check to see the performance of each of our campaigns. Campaigns are yet another traffic acquisition report. So acquisition, traffic. So now I just want to see campaigns. Choose campaign, source session campaign as the primary dimension. So now this is just showing me each of my campaigns. That's nice, but what if I want to see just the social campaigns? Well for that, just like we did a minute ago, I'm going to create a filter to see just when the medium contains social. Include when the dimension contains session medium is social. So now here are all my social media campaigns and I can see whatever I gave the campaign name when I set up the link in the URL builder and I can see some of these are sort of set up using a tool. Some of these are specific links from something we did on LinkedIn and I can see each of those ability to attract visitors, engage with visitors, and convert visitors into, for example, newsletter subscribers. So this is actually very powerful information because you can use this to say, for example, decide what to keep in heavy social rotation. Wow, this one had about a 6x ability to turn visitors into newsletter subscribers. That's when I should keep it heavy social rotation. You got a minute, you can share anything in social media. Why not share something that you have strong evidence to show that that was a compelling piece as in it had a higher than above trend ability to convert the visitor into a subscriber. So this is, you can see some of these are just way above. This one's more than 1% of visitors who saw that article, came from social media, saw that article, then turned into a subscriber. Other ones, it's literally 0%. So a big, big difference. Excellent. How do paid and organic visitors from social differ? What is the difference in engagement between paid and organic? It's really easy to see the difference because Google Analytics 4 actually calls these different default channel groups. Default channel groupings in Universal Analytics now called just default channel groups is actually there's a separate channel group for paid social and organic social. So for this literally, all I have to do is to come in here, I can see them right there. Paid social and organic social. So as long as I just type in the word social in this box, it's going to filter just for default channel groups that have the word social. So of course, it's just these two. And as I scroll over, I can see there's a big variance in their ability to attract visitors, the paid social campaigns driving traffic here, the engagement rate from these visitors, and even the conversions, the total number of conversions from these visitors. Yeah, so quite useful. What about desktop versus mobile? Those are sometimes very different, different sources of traffic, different device types. These people may have very different patterns of behavior on this website. So to find that actually, I can't easily do that just in the report section. So for that, I'm going to go create an exploration. When I do explorations, I normally just start with a blank exploration. This is just kind of a clean slate. It's sort of like a very basic version of Looker Studio. So for this exploration, I'm going to first start by adding a couple of dimensions. The dimensions that we'll find probably the most useful here are going to be session source. We'll take that one. I'll take session default channel group. That one might be useful. I'm also going to find maybe device category. So there is device category. So these are the dimensions that I want to use to build my report. And for the metrics, let's just take overall sessions because, as I've said, that's kind of a good high-level starting point. I'll take the session conversion rate because that could be interesting. Engagement rate's also probably interesting to me. So I'm going to just import all those. Now, I'm just going to sort of build the report by dragging and dropping these into these empty fields here. So for the row, I'm going to choose the session default channel group. We'll be able to narrow that down to social. I'm going to drag in my three different metrics to my values. So we'll put in the top of the funnel, sort of middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel, sessions, engagement rate, and conversion rate. So now I'm looking at all of the traffic sources for these, and basically, I just rebuilt the same report that you would have seen in the report section. Now, I only want to see social, so I'm going to create a filter of the default channel group by dragging that dimension down here into the filter, and I only want to see it when it contains the word social. Paid social, organic social, click apply, and there they are. Now, I can add the device category as another row, but in my experience, it's going to be a little bit hard to read, right, mobile, tablet, mobile, desktop, it's kind of confusing. Instead, let's add that as a column, and suddenly, the report becomes very easy to read. Tablet, do we really care about tablet? I think I'm going to exclude tablet by making one more filter. Device category, I want device category when it does not contain the word tablet because I don't really need to analyze those people separately, at least not today. I'm going to zoom out just a little bit so you can see the engagement rates for paid and organic for mobile, the engagement rates for paid and organic on desktop, the conversion rate. Wow, organic social has a low traffic but very high conversion rate for mobile. On the other hand, organic social does not convert very well on desktop, so the insights are actually jumping right out at me how different these types of users are and maybe how best to promote something. Great. Hope that was useful. That's kind of a quick crash course on how to use both the reports and an exploration in Google Analytics to measure social media traffic. Hope this was useful. We're going to keep making these. There's a lot that we've learned about GA4 and we're happy to show. As you can see, the approach is pretty straightforward. If this is helpful, feel free to subscribe, and we'd be grateful if you knew anyone else who needed this kind of how-to tutorial stuff. Please pass it along. Again, Andy from Orbit. Thanks again.