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Segmenting Social Traffic in Google Analytics

With social media playing an increasing role in internet marketing, it is becoming more important to track what social sites are bringing you visitors. The problem is, most web tracking tools right now don’t show a breakdown of “social media” in their traffic sources section. In Google Analytics, for example, there is a comprehensive data about everything else but social media traffic in its default settings.

Fortunately, something can be done about it in Google Analytics (and many other tools). By implementing the steps below, you can see better traffic statistics in Analytics:

Use Custom Segments
Just go to the “Traffic Sources” section and click on “Advanced Segment”. It is found in the right-hand corner. Afterwards, the “Create a New Advanced” segment feature should be chosen. This simple step enables you to filter results for deeper analysis.

Add Social Sites
Once you have added the custom segment, the next step involves creating a full list of words and websites to include. Using the exact URL of the popular social media sites isn’t recommended. Rather, add “or” statements rather than “end”. Some things to add include: tweet, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Digg, LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace, StumbleUpon, and Wikipedia among others. Try to get a complete list of popular social media sites to add words to the Advanced Google Analytics segment.

Name and Test Your Segment
It is important to test your segment in Google Analytics to ensure that you’re getting the results you want. Before you can test for results, the tool will ask you to name the segment that was just created. Click “Save Segment” to go back to the prior screen.

Filter Traffic Results by “(Name of Segment)”
Once the new segment has been created, it is now possible to filter social media and compare it with other traffic resources. If, in the past, you can only determine which social sites bring you traffic through the referring domain link (which is tough to sort through), it now becomes easier once the social referrals are separated.

With the data at hand, you can now see more opportunities from social media with regards to your niche or business. You can also compare the traffic data from various sources through charts – in weeks, months, or years. Better information equals more opportunities for most businesses. This is highly helpful for websites that intend to stay in business over the long term.

Google + Bing Confirm Twitter/Facebook Influence SEO

Both Google and Bing have admitted that rankings can be affected by social media links (aside from beneficial second-order effects on the link graph). This comes after months of suspicion from SEO experts that such was the case.
Basically, links coming in from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sings can provide a substantial boost to any SEO effort. The development is definitely a step forward. But this doesn’t mean that you should go ahead and spam social sites starting today! There are a few things to keep in mind:

• Social Authority of a User is looked into – for links on Twitter to count, both Google and Bing looks at how many people follow you and how many people you follow. Numbers are important in this game. It adds heft and credibility to the links in question.
• Author Quality – this just means that search engines can associate an author with his offline persona especially if he’s a public figure. After all, name searches for them will usually be significant as well. It is important to take note that author authority is different from PageRank, however.
• Diversity of Sources – 50 tweets containing a link from a single account are not nearly as valuable as getting it from 50 unique accounts.
• Surrounding Content – the text that accompanies a link provides search engines with important information about the topic and relevance. It also acts as a substitute for the lack of anchor text (specifically on Twitter).
• Activity Level – basically the number of re-tweets, clicks, and likes (from Facebook) influences the weight of a link.
• Extent of the Network – how many friends and followers do you have? This can provide a significant boost to web authority. More is better with few exceptions (like inauthentic accounts and bots).
• Friends and Follower Ratio – on Twitter, reciprocity is important. For example, if you’re following 5,000 people and only 100 people are on your list, then your account is not as authoritative as an account with 5,000 followers.
• Association Bias – if you regularly tweet about your newest blog posts, it will be detected by the search engines.

There is certainly nothing wrong with that, of course, but it carries less weight than if an outside author or company promotes your link on social media websites.

These are just some of the things you should consider if you intend to use social media to benefit your search engine rankings.

Importance of Search in Social Media

It might not have been apparent before but it is undeniable today, social media should become a tool in every marketer’s arsenal. And social search is a big part of it. After numerous studies on the behaviours of the buying public online, it became clear that most of them utilise the simple search box found on social media sites to find information. It saves them a lot of time and effort in searching.

When you asked internet users how they looked for information before, their top answer is always search engines. Going to the retailer website directly is a far second. But as the web becomes overcrowded with information, it has become harder to find targeted information that really matter. Search engine results pages (SERPs) are crowded with dominant content sites that specialty sites or blogs that contain more relevant content are overshadowed.

Searching Social Media

Because of this, people are turning to alternatives. Instead of wasting precious time sifting through pages on the search engines, they chose to go to social media search. The interesting thing about social media search is that the algorithm includes a human element rather than completely depending on computer data. That is, aside from human input on the content, many programs also analyse intent. Read More »

The Need to Implement a Combined Video SEO and SEO Strategy

Video SEO is the way of the future. Compared to regular text files, videos are 53 times likelier to appear on the first page of Google provided that it is correctly submitted and contains description, keywords, and the appropriate title. It is clear that a lot of companies are missing out on a lot of opportunities. Very few are submitting videos on YouTube.com and similar sites under the misconception that this would not generate benefits. It would.

In fact, Google is pushing videos to the very top of the search engine results page (SERO). This is a virtual goldmine for marketers who take advantage of this system early. Results usually appear within days. There is one crucial ingredient in Video SEO though: submission rights because Google can’t find video on its own.

The Excessive Advantages of Video SEO

In itself, Video SEO isn’t that different from traditional optimisation techniques but it stands out because of two distinctive reasons. One is that major search engines are working to display a mix of content into the search results. Because of this, you can expect higher ranking for videos compared to other forms of content. The second advantage of using video SEO is the undeniable dearth of videos today. And not all videos available are submitted property with SEO in mind. Read More »

The Merge between Caffeine and Social Media

It might not be public knowledge right now but numerous Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Companies and Social Media Firms are talking to each other. Previously, SEO and Social Media Marketing were seen as opposites. Experts in the industry themselves didn’t see the need to cooperate and coordinate until now. Read More »