02 Jun Structuring your Social Media Traffic for Success
In social media marketing just as in any type of marketing, being able to determine the campaigns that are moving the needle in your business is vital. In fact, you should be able to track all your traffic and know its exact source. This will allow you to analyse patterns in your users’ behaviour to consistently review your strategy and invest more time and budget on the platforms that are driving results. In this article, we will talk about some tactics that will help you optimise the traffic to your website and get clean data from Google Analytics that will tell you what your audience is after.
Excluding your IP Address from GA
The first thing you should do to help to improve the quality of the data that you’re getting from Google Analytics (GA) is to block your IP address. IP stands for “Internet Protocol” and an IP Address is a “unique string of numbers separated by full stops that identifies each computer using the Internet Protocol to communicate over a network”. If you don’t exclude your IP address on GA your visits to your website will, therefore, be taken into account and included in your reports, which will make the data inaccurate. So consider blocking the IP address of your office and if you work from home make sure to exclude that one too. Also, ask your employees to send you their home IP addresses, if they work from home as well, so that you can add them in the exclusion list.
To get your IP address simply go to https://www.whatsmyip.org/ and you will automatically see a message saying “your IP address is” followed by a 10 digit code. Now, how do you exclude your IP address from GA? Below are the different steps you should take to do that.
Exclude your IP address from GA
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Copy your IP address from whatsmyip.org/
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Login to Google Analytics
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Click the “Admin” menu
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Select “All Filters”
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Then click “Add Filter”
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Name your filter, you can call it as you wish, I simply call mine “My IP Address”
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Select the following: Filter Type: Predefined + Exclude + traffic from the IP addresses + that are equal to (see example below).
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Enter your IP address and save
Filter Type
Once you save your filter, click on “All Filters” and you’ll see it on the filter list. Repeat this process to exclude all the Wi-Fi networks you want to be excluded from your Google Analytics reports.
Organising your Social Traffic
Once you’ve blocked your IP address and your employees’, structure your social traffic by using UTM parameters to track and identify the source of your social traffic via Google Analytics. In this section we will focus essentially on social media, however, you should consider adding UTM tags to all your digital campaigns (emails, podcasts etc.) to improve the accuracy of your data.
To add UTM tags to your social posts, head to Google’s Campaign URL Builder. As soon as you get on the platform, you’ll be prompted to fill out a form to build out your UTM tagged URL. If you are getting started with UTM parameters, I’d suggest sticking with the required fields, which are:
- Website URL: the URL you’d like to track
- Campaign Source: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn etc.
- Campaign Medium: the type of traffic coming from that source (e.g. “organic”, “paid”, most people call their paid traffic cpc, which stands for Cost Per Click)
- Campaign Name: Add your campaign name (e.g. summer contest, branded video etc.)
Keep in mind that your input will constitute your UTM tagged URL, so I suggest avoiding the use of capital letters.
UTM Tags
Your campaign URL will be automatically updated as you fill out the form, you can then, scroll down to view it.
Once you’ve generated your URL you can either copy the long version or shorten it using Bitly, which integrates with the campaign URL builder and then share your content with your audience.
Following this process before sharing your content will help you to better identify your traffic, and have better visibility on the social platforms that are driving results for your business. In fact, each time that a user clicks on your UTM tagged links, you’ll see the results in the source/ medium report in Google Analytics. When you have access to that data, you can accurately analyse the campaigns that are generating conversions and those that are not supporting your business objectives. Thus, structuring your social traffic using UTM parameters will help you get better and better in conversion attribution and therefore smartly manage your marketing budget by investing it in platforms and campaigns that are generating the highest ROI (Return on Investment).
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