One of the best ways to increase traffic to your website is to tag your Social Media Followers. You can do this effectively by using Google Analytics. This will enhance the organic reach of your page posts on Facebook or any other social media network. This will prevent the performance of your page posts from dropping below the set benchmark.
- It is seen that, more often than not, you will need to boost your social posts to keep it fresh and exciting for the users.
- In addition to that, you will also need to create ads so that you can get more meaningful reach through your posts on Facebook.
When you spend time, effort, and money on such things, it is natural that you will want measurable results out of it. It is for this reason you should use Google Analytics to keep track of all your social media ad spending.
Interest tagging and traffic
At this point, you may wonder how exactly interest tagging helps in increasing website traffic. For this, you will need to know a bit about the interest targeting feature that Facebook replaced recently with the new Audience Optimization feature in 2016.
When this was done, a lot of speculations were made regarding whether or not this new feature will be able to improve the limitations that existed in the unpopular predecessor of it. However, after the release of the Preferred Audience Optimization feature, Facebook declared that:
- The new interest tags will not limit reach as its predecessor and therefore will be useful for any publisher to increase the reach of their posts and
- It also announced that the social network that typically generates more than 10% of the entire organic traffic to any online publisher website would increase the click-through rates with the use of this new interest tags.
A lot of experiments were made after that, and the findings of those results were evident and consistent. Therefore, randomly tagging of posts may not have as good an effect as carefully planned ones, which is one thing that you should keep in mind.
Using the UTM parameters
You can also use the UTM parameters to track your social media success and the amount of traffic that it has generated. The UTM parameters will help you in the process to know the ROI as well as the areas of changes that are necessary.
Ideally, there are four simple steps to set up and use these UTM parameters to track your social media followers, followers for Instagram , and results to ensure more traffic to your site.
- First, you will need to set up Google Analytics because of the data collected by the UTM parameters will be fed into it. Just create a free Google Analytics account or sign in to your existing account, add the website as the Property, select the industry category and the reporting time zone, and then click on Get Tracking ID.
- Next, add the UTM parameters to your social posts, either directly using the Hootsuite Composer by using a Google tool.
- Follow it by tracking your social media campaigns with UTM parameters along with the list of all the campaigns and trackable URLs that you have created as well as the traffic count and conversion rates.
- Lastly, analyze the data provided by the UTM parameters.
All these will successfully help you to improve your social media efforts as well as increase the traffic to your website.
Enhance your social sharing
When you encourage social sharing of your posts, you will prevent the people from copying and pasting your links to share it on different other private networks. However, you will need to make sure that the users can see the social sharing button all the time. Therefore, ensure that the share icons on your posts are precisely placed.
Different brands and businesses follow different ways of encouraging their social followers to share their posts of various kinds. For example:
- Some companies suggest their users share snippets on the social channels that are pre-defined.
- Other companies specifically focus on the copy-paste problems that result inevitably into dark social traffic that allows their users to attach meta-data to the text when they copy from their blog with a URL.
There are lots of ways for such sharing, such as using a WordPress plugin, sharing through WhatsApp, and more.
Use analytics social channel wisely
In some cases, you may want to use the Analytics social channel. However, if you do not use it properly, then you are in for your worst nightmare. This is because Google Analytics presets will not show you what you want.
They will primarily show you a default social channel. This means that you will need to customize that channel that you want to see, or else you will miss out on the significant part of the social media traffic that may not be shown to you.
If done correctly, the Google Analytic channels report will show every channel, such as:
- Direct
- Organic Search or
This report will act actually as a filter that will attribute a part of the entire inbound traffic to your site, depending on a few specific criteria. Just as it is with any filter, it will follow the rules and will be only as good as the rules are.
The problem of under-reporting
When it comes to using the Google Analytics social reports, there is one significant thing that you should focus on. It would be best if you made sure that the data provided is accurate; otherwise, it will not be useful.
Unfortunately, it is often inaccurate. The primary reason for this inaccuracy is the under-reporting factor of social referrals in Google Analytics. This is because a considerable section of the social media traffic may be classified as Direct and therefore, will never show up in the Social reports.
To conclude, tagging may not solve all problems but will help you to track your content to find when people retweet. You can then drive them to your site to increase traffic count.