Tracking Social Media with Google Analytics and Hootsuite

Hootsuite just added a new capability that allows users to create custom URL Parameters for analytics tracking.  This is very powerful and has been on my Hootsuite “wishlist” for quite a while. Here’s why:  one of the issues with social media contributions  is that tracking outcomes and associating them to Social Media Objectives is quite difficult (though definitely not impossible). This new Hootsuite feature now enables detailed tracking of Twitter distributed content and can be directly tied to detailed Social Media Metrics.

Let’s look at a use case for this feature. I will use a hypothetical example from a prior post on McKinsey’s use of Social Media.

• McKinsey Quarterly uses their Twitter feed to highlight articles on their website. Each Twitter post includes a shortened URL.
• By using the Hootsuite Custom URL Parameters, each of these shortened URLs can now have an analytics “payload” so that every click-through from a social media network can be attributed to the:
  • Source (e.g. Twitter or LinkedIn)
  • Medium (e.g. Social Media)
  • Campaign (e.g. Steady State Tweets)
  • …and other custom attributes (e.g. User Id)
• Using  Google Analytics (or other analytics packages) website Goals can now be associated to a specific Twitter post or Campaign.

Nice job Hootsuite!

How would you use the new Custom URL Parameters to track your campaigns ?

4 Responses to “Tracking Social Media with Google Analytics and Hootsuite”

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   March 9, 2010 at 4:10 pm

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