Is there are any way to track how many visitors come from a social media channel like Facebook to a landing page and from here to an external page (although an affiliate)?
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What exactly are you looking for - how many people made this 3-step journey? Or something more detailed?– ReveMar 30, 2020 at 13:50
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Exactly what I am looking for - key is, I want to follow them from our own SoMe channel to our webpage, and then who leaves for a particular external link again.– Materazzi23Apr 1, 2020 at 13:22
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I've never seen "social media" shortened to SoMe before. I expanded that unusual short form in your question to make it more easily understandable. Google does show some usage of that as marketing jargon, but it isn't an industry standard short form yet.– Stephen Ostermiller ♦Dec 27, 2020 at 21:33
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1 Answer
You can certainly do this! You may need to edit links and add tracking so that GA can distinguish the traffic you're interested in, but nothing technically complicated.
First, to track inbound traffic from your own social media pages specifically, you'll need to tag your links with UTM parameters. I would suggest keeping the source as the social media channel, setting medium to something neutral like "social", and using campaign to identify these links. Something like:
https://www.example.com/landing-page?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=owned-social
Edit the links you post on social media to include those parameters, and visits from people clicking on them will show in GA as having a Campaign of "owned-social", which you can filter and segment on. "Owned social" is quite generic for a campaign name, and you can make it more specific to what you are trying to do; it just needs to be unique.
Google has a Campaign URL Builder that will speed up the process of making versions of these links for different channels, and help avoid typos.
Tracking of landing pages is automatic; nothing needed there.
For the external link, you must track clicks on the appropriate links as an Event in GA. You could have a Category of "Outbound Link", Action that denotes the affiliate linked to (I will use "Affiliate" as a placeholder), and optionally a Label with additional detail, such as which link the person clicked if there is more than one on the page.
Once you have that all in place, you can use a segment to track how many people went from point A to B to C. You'll defined a session-level segment with 3 filters.
In the Traffic Sources panel of the segment builder, set Campaign to exactly matches owned-social. In the Conditions panel, set Landing Page to starts with /landing-page, and Event Action to exactly matches Affiliate. (These last should be joined by and, which will happen automatically if you use the "Add Filter" button, or can be selected when adding a condition to the first filter.)
You won't even have to save your segment to see the totals and percentage of traffic meeting these criteria - it will appear in the right-hand column of the segment builder. And if you check those numbers before adding the Event filter, you'll be able to calculate what percentage of the people who arrived at your landing page from your social media clicked through on the affiliate link.
[By "people" I mean "sessions", really, but proportionally you should get a good sense for how enticed people are to click through.]
