Google Analytics Now Tracks Social Engagement

There are lots of ways for businesses to keep track of their social media activities and performances. Today, there are hardly any business which doesn’t have a Twitter, LinkedIn or a Facebook fan page. If you just invest enough time on these platforms, they can be efficiently and effectively used  for businesses.

Google is getting social in every other way. The addition of +1 button and the release of Google+ invites are making waves in the social media platform.  Now it’s the Google Analytics Social Engagement Reporting  that makes the headlines. Google Analytics now provide new tool for tracking social interaction with their content in addition to Google +1 button. The tool compares the impact of different types of social actions on your website. It tracks Google +1 button clicks, Twitter tweets, Facebook “Like” and “Send” interactions and Del.icio.us bookmarks. The reports will give a neat review of how your site behaviour alters by these social button clicks, number of clicks on your site, compare the pages on your site that receive the maximum social button clicks.

Google says providing social reporting is just the start. “As people continue to find new ways to interact across the web, we look forward to new reports that help business owners understand the value that social actions are providing to their business. So +1 to data!”

The social plugin tracking generates 3 different reports:
Social Engagement report: Displays site behavior changes for visits that include clicks on +1 buttons or other social actions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Actions report: Lets you track the number of social actions (+1 clicks, Tweets, etc.) taken on your site, all in one place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Pages report: Compares the pages on your site to see which are driving the highest number of social actions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This addition is so essential that Google create the Social Interaction Tracking, a new functionality  that will be used for social tracking only. The syntax is as follows:

    _trackSocial(network, socialAction, opt_target, opt_pagePath)
  1. Network: Name of the social network (google, facebook, twitter, digg, etc)
  2. SocialAction: Type of action (like, tweet, send, stumble)
  3. opt_target: Subject of the action being taken. Optional, defaults to the URL being shared (document.location.href). Can be manually set to anything: a different URL (if they’re sharing content that “points” to another URL), an entity (e.g, product name, article name), or content ID
  4. opt_pagePath: The page on which the action occurred. Optional, defaults to the URI where the sharing took place (document.location.pathname). Can be manually set (like a virtual pagename).

All said and done, Google is in full swing.

Credits to Searchengineland.com

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