Everything You Need To Know About Using Google Analytics

One of the greatest advantages offered by social media marketing is the ability to measure and quantify your online impact. Unfortunately, as an artist or musician, it can sometimes be difficult to determine which aspects of this feedback are actually of value. Here we look at how to utilize Google Analytics in a way which allows you to measure and evaluate your success on social platforms.

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Guest post by Randi Zimmerman from the Symphonic Blog

One of the best things about social media is that you can measure almost everything about it. The problem is, sometimes it’s hard to know which info is pertinent to your growth and what isn’t.

With Google Analytics, you get a lot of info at your disposal, but you definitely don’t want to streamline your efforts onto tracking data that isn’t going to help you meet your specific goals. So, how do you know what to focus on?

Luckily, this is easy to figure out.

What you need to know about using Google Analytics to measure social media success:

If you’ve searched the web for Google Analytics before, you’ve probably encountered the term, S.M.A.R.T. It’s talked about a ton, and for good reason. Setting S.M.A.R.T goals will be what makes or breaks your success.

S.M.A.R.T stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.

This is important to know, so here’s a quick rundown of what each of those entails:

Specific: Setting super vague goals makes them harder to achieve. Saying you want more followers is a great idea, but you need to set goals that are specific and more easily measurable in order to keep track of your progress.

Measurable: That being said, to know whether you’ve hit your goal or not, it’ll need to have measurable numbers behind it. So, instead of something like, “We want more sales via social media”, you want something more like, “We aim to see a 5% increase in purchases from traffic from social media.”

Attainable: Of course, it’s great to have huge goals. Go big or go home, amiright? Sadly, no. The reality is if you go too big, you’re sure to end up going home. Set goals that’re actually attainable for you to avoid getting overwhelmed halfway through your efforts.

Relevant: Your goal needs to be something that matters to your business right now. Think about what would happen if you didn’t meet the goal you have in mind. Is it a pertinent issue? How would not meeting this goal impact your business?

Timely: Having a deadline will help motivate you to accomplish your goal. So, the original goal we came up with should be changed from, “We aim to see a 5% increase in purchases from traffic from social media.” to something like, “We aim to see a 5% increase from Q1 in purchases from traffic from social media by the end of Q2.”

If you’re setting S.M.A.R.T social media goals, you probably need a goal that involves driving more traffic to your website. Google Analytics will give you all the data you need to measure your social media marketing.

With Google Analytics, you get data like:

• What types of content topics work for your audience?
• Which platform brings the most traffic back to your website?
• What does your social media traffic do once they’ve reached your site? Are they engaged or do they exit right away?

Once you know what this data means for you, you can improve your strategy and put more energy into the things that work and get rid of the shit that doesn’t.