Social Media Traffic

Now that you know how to create individual segments, you can create a more comprehensive segment that analyzes traffic from more than one social media outlet.

You can use this type of segment to include the traffic from StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, LinkedIn and any other social media site.

As an example, below are some of the sites you can include in this segment using the OR statement:

twitter.com
t.co
hootsuite
tweetdeck
bit.ly
facebook.com
m.facebook.com
plus.url.google.com
linkedin
youtube
reddit
digg
delicious
stumbleupon
ycombinator
flickr
myspace
popurls

A simpler version of this segment would be to select as a condition Matching RegExp, which will use a regular expression to detect the traffic that matches your condition.

The advantage of this will be the fact that you will not need to type in 10-20 conditions for this segment, but just one.

To create this segment, select Matching RegExp as condition and then type in brackets “()” the social media sites that send traffic to you, separated by a vertical bar “|”, just like the code below:

Understanding Social Media Traffic

Now you have four powerful segments that will help you get more insights about your visitors.

You can use the first three to see how they compare to each other and if there are any big differences among them.

You can use the fourth to see how visitors who come from social media sites behave on your own site and how they convert.

We will cover more about this in future articles, but to start you should have a look at the Audience reports to determine their behavior, how engaged they are with your site (how much time they spend reading your content), how frequently they come to your site or the ratio of new visitors to returning visitors.

The Content section is the one that you should check next to see the pages your social media peers visit on your site, your site speed for their connection or what they search for on your website.

For example, you can see from the screenshot below that the visitors coming from Twitter (even if they have a higher number of visits) are less engaged with the content of the website, because the majority spend less than 10 seconds on the website.


You can use the above segment to compare the traffic from multiple social media outlets and see where you should invest more time, which one sends you more engaged visitors, visitors that convert and much more.

With the more comprehensive segment or if you apply only one segment, you can actually filter the traffic and see all of the Google Analytics reports for that specific segment.

This helps you identify visitors’ behavior and engagement for that specific segment of traffic.