Posted by Social media has become an integral part of online business today. These platforms have millions of users which greatly increase their value in terms of marketing.
Basically, social media is a simple, effective, and often inexpensive way to launch ads, but you can often run into difficulties. The difficulty comes from the fact that there are a lot of ads running on these interfaces, so people are already selecting them and they often do not notice them.
Of course, this will also reduce your traffic. But how can you track social media traffic?
You can read about this below.
1. Social media traffic
First and foremost, let’s clarify what social media traffic is. Your website can receive visitors and buyers from multiple sources. These can be:
- Search engines
- Emails
- Other websites
- Social networks
Here are the top 4 sources that can boost the number of your visitation. Of these four, we will only deal with social media, as it generates 30% of the average traffic today, which is a huge number.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that you need to spend less time on SEO or other online marketing activities. You need to put the same emphasis on all the sources listed previously.
But let’s get to the point. How can social media generate traffic to your website?
The response is very simple, through a link in your ad. The problem starts there, of course, that this link will also need to be clicked on by your target audience.
Unfortunately, we have to say that 60 out of 100 ads are still unsuccessful today because advertisers don’t use the right CTAs, design elements, or the campaign just isn’t attention-grabbing enough. Using videos can help a lot in this, for example.
This is due to the fact that many people forget the importance of preliminary analyzes. We recommend that you run a heatmap analysis on your website before creating your conversion-enhancing social media campaign.
Thanks to heatmaps, you can display elements in your ad that are sure to increase your traffic.
But what if you already have an effective campaign? How can you measure how much traffic you have brought and how much you have increased your conversion rate with it?
Let’s examine your possibilities.
2. Data visualization tools
When it comes to measuring the traffic, you will definitely have a lot of data and numbers in mind. But you have plenty of options that are much more modern and creative than that.
Let’s look at some modern tools:
- Heatmaps
- Replays
These two data visualization tools are perfect for measuring the source of your visitors and how they use your website.
If we look at heatmaps, segment heatmaps will be the most suitable for this purpose.
These tools use different colors for visitors from each source. With their help, you will clearly see how many people have come from social media interfaces and what they are interested in on your website.
With this information in mind, you’ll clearly see how each campaign has yielded your results, and it can also be useful during the website optimization process.
Interestingly, 39% of websites use some form of heatmap analytics to measure traffic and other optimization processes today. If we take into account that in 2021 there were about 2.1 billion websites available on the internet then we can see that this is a huge number. 819 million websites can not lie, right?
In addition to heatmaps, you may have to consider other creative data visualization tools when measuring your social media traffic. This is where session replays come into play.
It’s important to note that replays aren’t primarily designed to measure traffic, but rather to monitor the behavior of visitors to your website. However, we strongly recommend that you use it alone or in combination with heatmaps.
There are session replay tools that select visitors in the same way by source. So again, you can get a comprehensive picture of how many people came to your website through social media.
What’s more, you can also find out which buttons were clicked the most or which of your products were clicked the most. With this information in mind, you will be able to create an even more perfect social media campaign in the future.
As you can see, when you measure traffic, you don’t have to think about huge excel spreadsheets right away, there are much more creative solutions than that.
However, keep in mind that large amounts of data and large spreadsheets are tremendous values and are often more expedient than creative tools. Let’s see how you can collect big data about your social media traffic.
3. Good old methods
Who said traditional is obsolete? This is not true.
You also need to take quantitative measurements to measure the number of visitors from your social media. Let’s see what options you have in this area:
- Google Analytics
- Built-in measurement tools for social networking sites
Let’s start at the beginning. Why is it important to use Facebook’s built-in measurement tool, for example, in addition to heatmaps and session replays?
- Because from this data, you can tell the effectiveness of each campaign
- These tools show the traffic data separately
- Only from these data can you draw conclusions or trends
Just think about it, with a heatmap analysis, you can see how much traffic you received from social media overall. But how do you know if that visitor came to your website from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or even TikTok?
This is one of the key reasons why you also need to collect quantitative data. Let’s see how you can measure these.
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the perfect way to measure your traffic from a variety of sources. You can set which resources (Facebook, Instagram … etc.) to measure separately.
This way, you can see on which platform how effective your campaigns are and from which interface how much traffic you have received.
An additional benefit of the tool is that, in addition to the data mentioned above, it shows you where geographically your particular social media ad was clicked.
This will also make it clear to you which people are active in your campaigns and for whom you need to advertise more intensively. But it’s not over yet.
In the case of quantitative data, it is important to be able to visualize the data somehow. This is an automated process when you use Google Analytics.
Once you’ve set up your potential social media resources and what you want to measure (in this case, the traffic generated by that particular platform), the tool will automatically generate an illustration of that. This way, you can constantly monitor how your social media traffic has evolved, you can draw different trends, and you can quickly notice deteriorations.
Sounds good, right?
5. Built-in tools
They are not much different from Google Analytics in terms of the features of the built-in tools. The advantage is that you don’t have to set anything up, as when you connect to your social media account, it automatically takes the measurements.
Pre-programmed parameters such as traffic, engagement, or reach will be examined.
Their disadvantage is that you have to analyze the metrics for each page separately, just like traffic.
You need to log into the analytics interface of Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter separately and analyze the data one by one. In addition, the built-in measurement tools do not contain aggregate data, so if you choose this method to measure your traffic, you should make a spreadsheet of it.
Conclusion
As you can see, measuring social media traffic is a fairly multifaceted process. You have many options to complete this process.
We recommend that you use qualitative measurement tools, such as heatmaps, together with quantitative measurement methods. This will give you the most comprehensive view of your traffic.
If you follow our advice, it’s sure that you will always be up-to-date with your current position in your traffic.
We hope we can help.