In Google Analytics tracking traffic from “a” source is easy, all you need to do is to select the source and you can see the traffic.
What if you want to track traffic not from one but many sources so that you can group them together to see how your campaign is performing for this group?
Social Media is one of the best example which you would like to track. Lets say you are running campaign on facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg etc and you would like to monitor the traffic from these in a group.
How to do it?
The answer is using Google Analytics Advance Segment.
Here is step by step guide to track social media traffic in Google Analytics using Advance Segment.
On Google Analytics dashboard click on Advance Segment – All Visits which is in top right corner. It will expand and will show you many options.
Click on Create a new advance segment
Next you will see another dashboard with drag n drop menus. From left pane click on Traffic Sources. Under Traffic Sources you will see Source menu. Drag Source and drop in right side as shown in image below.
In the Value box type t and click on arrow and it will expand to show all sources with t in it. Select twitter.com. In the Condition option either you can choose Matches Exactly or Contains. I usually select Contains so that I don’t miss any traffic from subdomains.
That is how you add source in advance segment.
Next step is to add more sources. To do so click on Add “or” statement and it will show one more box to add source. Drag Source menu from left to this box and enter facebook in the value.
Repeat above for all the social media which you would like to track.
Once you have added all social media sources, give this Advance Segment a name. Towards the bottom you will find a box to enter name for this Segment.
Enter the name and save it.
Next is to test this Advance Segment reporting. On the top right and bottom right you will find the Test Segment link, click on that link to test it. It will show you traffic from social media for the sources which you have selected.
You can verify the correctness by going back to Google Analytics dashboard and checking the traffic for individual social media sources. You might see some differences which are due to the fact that the value entered in advance segment – sources might not cover all subdomains if you haven’t entered values correctly.
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