Tracking Individual Social Media Campaigns?

Question

I've been given the task of promoting fundraising events online using Social Media and Google Analytics for our website.

Each fundraising event, has it's own Social Media Campaign. The purpose of a Social Media Campaign is to measure the engagement (from year to year) of people viewing the events and to see if it is improving or not.

As I see it there are two ways to measure the engagement:

• qualitative - Measure if we are reaching the correct demographic
• quantitative - Measure how many conversions we are getting

Both of these measurements can be measured from the various sources from which people are directed to an event page from our website:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+
• Various Local Business Sites
• Google Organic Search Results
• Ads

Now considering this, I know that Google Analytics is capable to telling me where the the traffic might have come from, and what buttons someone may have clicked on my website.

But I have this feeling that I'm somehow mis-using Google Analytics as there is only one tracking number for all the pages in my site. It almost seems like I should have a separate tracking number for each of my Social Media Campaigns (read each of the fundraising events) that are on my website. And in this way I would be able to get numbers on just a particular event for a particular year, instead of for an entire website for the entirety of its existence.

Can I make multiple tracking IDs for a single website?

Answer 1

Google Analytics can track social media sources under a single UA tracking code for your entire site. They refer to the concept as custom campaigns.

The trick is to add parameters to the URLs that you post on each of the social media sites using the Google Analytics Tracking URL Builder.

So when you post your links on various social media websites they might look something like this:

• Twitter: http://example.com/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=campaign_2014
• Facebook: http://example.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=campaign_2014
• Facebook Ads: http://example.com/?utm_source=facebookad&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=campaign_2014
• etc.

The only ones you won't be able to tag are the organic search and organic referrer links. But those aren't really marketing campaign driven so much as base marketing.

Once you have your inbound links tagged, you can visit "Aquisition" -> "Campaigns" in Google Analytics to get quantitative stats about each of your campaigns.

You should also set up "goals" that let you see the conversion rates for your campaigns.