By Nichole Kelly
Published December 3, 2014 
Do you want to understand your social media return-on-investment (ROI)?
Are you tracking the customer journey in Google Analytics?
In this article you’ll discover how to collect and analyze the data you need to properly calculate how social media marketing impacts your business.
Find steps to measure social media ROI with Google Analytics.
#1: Create a Custom Segment
The good news is that you already have data you can segment into control groups. When someone visits your website from a social media network, Google has an automated way of identifying that user and adding him/her to reporting under Acquisition > Social.
The challenge with the data setup is that you have a limited number of reports you can view, and you have very little control over how the data is displayed.
The solution: Set up a custom segment that mirrors how Google Analytics automatically tracks the traffic from each social network. Here’s how:
Log into Google Analytics.
- Go to Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals. Hover over any of the social networks in the report to see how Google determines the traffic from that network.
- At the top of the page, click on Add Segment, then click the red New Segment box.
Adding segments is easy to do.
- Title the report GA Default Social Users.
- Click on Conditions.
- Select Source Contains and type in what you saw in the drop-down list(e.g., Twitter.com). Using Twitter as an example, you’ll notice other types of Twitter traffic come up as you type. Take note of what shows up and add those too. You can do that by clicking OR and typing the new criteria.
- Review the All Sessions numbers to see if they match the Default Social Users numbers. If they don’t, follow steps 8 and 9 to edit the segment.
- Click on the arrow next to the segment at the top of the page and select Edit.
- Repeat this process for each social network until all of the numbers match.
- Type in the network name and see if additional traffic sources show up. If they do, add them to your segment. Then check again to see if the All Sessions numbers match the GA Default Social Users number.
Your GA All Sessions number should match the Default Social Users number.
If you have a lot of social traffic, you may run out of fields if you keep selecting OR for each criterion. If that’s the case, consider using Regex to include multiple criteria in one field.
Use Matches Regex to include multiple criteria in one field.
To use Regex, select Source > Matches Regex. Use the pipe (see the image above) with no spaces before or after each criterion to signify OR. To get the pipe, hold shift and press the backslash key.
