Measure social success with web activity
Attributing activity on your website to your social efforts is essential for proving social ROI. Site activity includes visits, page views, sign ups, downloads, purchases, or other conversions. By connecting Google Analytics to Impact, you can measure your social campaign performance based on this data. Learn how to set up your web analytics integration
Attribute ROI to individual posts
Once Impact is pulling in your web analytics data, the next step is tracking the site activity driven from individual posts. To do this, the posts that you publish must contain links with appended UTM parameters. In addition, one of these UTM parameters must be unique to the post. UTM parameters are tags added to a link that contain identifying information about the link, such as its source, or the campaign it belongs to. Learn more about UTM parameters
Here’s an example of a link with UTM parameters. Here the ‘content’ parameter is being used as the unique tag:
https://blog.hootsuite.com/ utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=hs_corp_social&utm_content=28795gsn63kj
Hootsuite's Composer lets you apply dynamic UTMs that automatically assign unique link parameters at the post level.
What is the benefit of unique UTM parameters?
When each post contains a unique UTM, Impact can then recognize which activity on your website was driven from which link in a specific post. This unlocks value for you in the following areas:
- Browse Content - See how a single post drove website visits, page views, or other goal conversions. Configure your content table to add columns for Website Pageviews and Website Visits. These will help you identify the posts that performed well and drove the most traffic to your site. If your posts don’t contain unique UTM parameters, these columns will always display 0.
You can also click on a post in the Browse Content table to open the individual post analysis view. Web analytics data for the post is displayed under the Intent tab. - Filter Content - Filter by campaign tag (e.g., summer camping) and then look at all your web conversion data to see how each campaign as a whole performed in driving activity on your website.
- ROI Analysis - Compare the activity generated by your own posts to the activity generated by other people posting links to your website (this is sometimes called ‘owned vs earned’ social data).
Select one of your own social accounts from the platform drop-downs to view the web activity (Website Pageviews, Website Visits, and Goals) attributed to your posts on each social profile. Select “Non-UTM Traffic to [your domain]” to view all activity from other sources on the social network that led to your website.
What if unique UTMs are not used?
Without a unique UTM on each link you post, you won’t be able to measure your content performance at the individual post level. Website metrics in Browse Content and Filter Content will display 0.
In ROI Analysis, data only appears for each of your social accounts if posts contain unique UTMs. If they don't, all your website activity gets combined with your earned data under ‘Non-UTM Traffic' for each social network as a whole. This means you won't be able to separate the conversions that resulted from clicks on your own posts and clicks on other people’s posts.
Contact your customer success manager if you don’t see Non-UTM Traffic data for your social accounts.