Comments on: Google Analytics Social Reports

By: Sam H

Sam H — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 09:27:00 +0000

It’s certainly a start – I’m fortunate enough to work alongside a great company who are doing some exciting things in the SEO/PPC analytics space – we have regular discussions about integrating social more deeply with their tool.

I’m a firm believe that a quality tool *has* to exist in order to avoid a future where social media is only considered fluff. Those of us who’ve witnessed its power know it not to be true, but try selling that to a client!

By: NearlyNubile

NearlyNubile — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 03:29:00 +0000

These are not “social analytics”. These are still web analytics, honing in on traffic from “social” sites. That’s it. Avinash and Google need to realize that marketers spend their dollars on MANY bigger things than their website. Most top brand marketers don’t do a lot of work on their websites anyway, which is mostly brochureware. Google is not really a player in all of those analytics.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:45:00 +0000

Nice review of the updates. Following up on Tim’s point, do you have any sense if there will be native support for social actions (likes, tweets), aside from google+? I’ve tried following Google’s instructions with the trackSocial method, but frustratingly haven’t been able to get it right.

By: Dave Chaffey

Dave Chaffey — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:05:00 +0000

In reply to Tim Leighton-Boyce.

Thanks for the further clarification Tim – I didn’t realise that API had changed. Hopefully everything should stabilise after this latest release.

The sad thing is we have too many other dev priorities to fix this soon – same for many others I suspect.

Still the tools showing number of referrals by content is a big step forward convenience wise

By: Seo company

Seo company — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:57:00 +0000

social and viral marketing are such a good compliment to each other and great for increasing traffic and popularity to your website. Many people focus on just using one, i work for an SEO company and believe its important to use everything you can to increase traffic in an honest way 🙂

By: Tim Leighton-Boyce

Tim Leighton-Boyce — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:31:00 +0000

In reply to Dave Chaffey.

I’m not sure if the Yoast system is using the current GA social tracking code, as described at

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingSocial.html

From what I have read in the article you linked to on Yoast, they’re using the earlier ‘event’ based approach. So those would show up in the older events reports, not the new social reports.

BUT… I tried looking at the data as I did a couple of test Tweets just now and I couldn’t see evidence either way. What with Twitter themselves and Disqus doing their own GA tracking it all got a bit confusing. In fact I could only see the Yoast extra author/category etc event data being sent. Not even the pageview itself. Weird.

This was with Firefox 11 on a Mac, by the way. Such issues can sometimes be browser specific. I’m probably crying wolf.

By: Dave Chaffey

Dave Chaffey — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:50:00 +0000

In reply to Tim Leighton-Boyce.

Thanks for the clarification Tim!

I doubt you’re out of date!

What I didn’t say is that our share widgets are based on the Yoast Social plugin : http://yoast.com/social-buttons/ which I thought incorporate these GA tracking codes. I’ll have to check when I get a chance.

These are one part of the new service that aren’t out of the box and can be difficult to implement depending on which plugins you’re using.

Dave

By: Tim Leighton-Boyce

Tim Leighton-Boyce — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:34:00 +0000

I may be out of date here, but I think that even the native versions of Twitter and Facebook buttons don’t include the GA social tracking codes. They’d have to be added manually. Some of the third-party social widgets (Add This) etc are supposed to have the code buit in, but I have no personal experience of this.

By: Dave Chaffey

Dave Chaffey — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:18:00 +0000

In reply to Sam H.

Well said Sam – but not sure about this – the 10% needs to be representative! Hopefully it won’t come to this or we’ll use cookieless analytics logfiles like the good old day.

Dave

By: Dave Chaffey

Dave Chaffey — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:16:00 +0000

In reply to Danny Blair.

Hi Danny, yes analytics is going to get tougher and soon, no doubt.

I’m hoping that the ICO will accept the upcoming browser settings to manage these – they are at least first-party cookies.

I can’t see many companies stopping using GA by 1st May…

The lack of “not provided” search results is more of an issue for me – now up to 25% for us.