By Sophorn Chhay
You pour a great deal of time, energy, and money into social media marketing, so it can be disheartening when it doesn’t seem that you’re getting much return – or are you? What if I told you that you could be getting substantially more traffic from your social media than what analytic tools like Google Analytics is recording? Believe it or not, it is very likely that’s what’s happening to you. I’m going to tell you why it happens and how you can determine the actual traffic.
The Big Three
Google Analytics is great, but it can’t do everything. There are situations that interfere with social media tracking. Basically, when the URL is routed through a third party system, is accessed outside of the direct social media platform, or is altered, it can cause problems for traffic analyzers. Here are the primary reasons social media traffic may be untrackable:
- Applications
- Dark Social Media
- Services that Shorten URLs
Why Should You Care?
When you track the traffic to your site you want to know what’s working and what isn’t. If your Twitter posts are producing substantial traffic while your LinkedIn account is getting only a few, then you need to examine the differences between what you are doing on each, analyze the audiences, and see if you can improve results across platforms. If you can’t tell where the link was accessed, that could be a problem because you have no way to measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing – or effectively measure it anyway.
Applications
Mobile device usage is surpassing computer usage. More people are picking up their smartphones or tablets to log onto applications like Facebook or Twitter. Around 89 percent of consumer media time is now spent in mobile applications. Mobile marketing can be a challenge in and of itself, but when you factor in the probability that traffic from social media apps may not track correctly it becomes a headache.
For instance, someone clicks on your link while using the Facebook app on their phone. You will likely see direct traffic from that hit, but what you won’t see is that the original referrer was that witty post you created on Facebook. What’s more, no matter what page the link points to, only the home page will be recorded as a hit. Clicking that link in the application opens a new browser – and a new browser session and the referrer is lost.
Dark Social Media Traffic
Dark social media traffic isn’t as sinister as it sounds, but it can still be a traffic measurement problem. This type of traffic may have originated on one of your social media accounts, but somehow the link was actually accessed outside of the platform – hence the name “dark.”
Look at it this way. One of your Facebook fans copies a link you shared and sends it via email to five people. These people each send it to 5 people and they all view it. That’s 30 hits – and they are all counted as direct traffic. Login based systems like Hootsuite do the same thing.
Services that Shorten URLs
Link shortening services like bit.ly are great for making a URL fit in a social media post and are popular on sites like Twitter where every character counts. However, the social referrer gets lost in the process. From an analytics standpoint this is a nightmare. You may see that you received direct traffic, but you won’t see where it actually came from.
Let’s say you are sharing a link on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Three links from three different social media platforms should show traffic from each site, right? Not so fast. If you shortened the URL using one of the services, you won’t see that you received traffic from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Instead you will just see three direct traffic hits.
How to Remedy the Situation
There is a remedy to this issue, but it can be quite cumbersome. The Google URL builder tool will allow you to create a custom campaign URL. Essentially, it tags the URL so even if you shorten it or anything else it retains those tags. The catch is that you have to build each link separately and tag it with Twitter, Facebook, or whatever social media platform you are posting it on. It is a solution, albeit not necessarily an ideal one. Whether you use it or not is something only you can decide. Is it worth the extra time and effort to add the tags? Or are you fine with only seeing part of the picture?
