Google Analytics and Social Media: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you track the return on your social media activity in Google Analytics?

Want to discover some valuable shortcuts?

To explore cool hacks for Google Analytics, I interview Annie Cushing.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Annie Cushing, Google Analytics expert and chief data officer at Outspoken Media digital marketing agency. She's a total analytics geek who loves teaching other marketers how to make the most of their analytics data.

Annie explores Google Analytics, social reporting, dashboards, and more.

You'll discover how to customize Google Analytics reports for yourself.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Google Analytics and Social Media
What's New in Google Analytics

Starting May 15, 2017, Google Analytics will allow people to do remarketing across multiple devices. Annie explains that if someone visits your site on their mobile device and then comes back to it on their laptop, as long as they're logged into Google in both places, you'll be able to target them across their devices. This new capability is a huge step forward for remarketing audiences because few people shop only on their computer, tablet, or phone.

Annie explains that Google previously relied on user IDs to offer remarketing features, but most businesses couldn't implement the technology very easily. Only advanced analysts could set it up for sites where users were highly incentivized to log in. Because most businesses don't have sites like that, this new ability is groundbreaking.

Annie says one issue she regularly sees with clients is they seldom use Google Analytics for retargeting. Instead, they use AdWords and DoubleClick.

However, Google Analytics enables marketers to get much more granular with targeting. For instance, you can serve an ad to someone who visited a certain page but didn't convert or to someone who put something in a cart but didn't check out. Hopefully, multiple-device retargeting will incentivize more people to take advantage of Google Analytics.

Listen to the show to discover how a retargeting ad saved Annie last Christmas.

Google Optimize

Google recently announced they were releasing Google Optimize, a free tool for A/B testing. For example, say you want to experiment with product page design, such as the placement of the price or Buy button or different font colors or text. In an A/B test, you run two versions of your page and compare how each version performs.

Up until this point, Optimizely has been the industry standard. At Social Media Examiner, we use Visual Website Optimizer.

Annie believes Google Optimize is perfect for small- to mid-sized or even large businesses. (Google Optimize 360 is the enterprise-level version.) Annie recommends that businesses get what they can from the free version first. Then as your organization develops more sophisticated testing needs (for instance, reducing the bounce rate or increasing the conversion rate), consider paying for more advanced features.

Annie also notes that Google Optimize is user-friendly. To move things around, you simply drag and drop. You don't have to ask a developer to customize the page for you.

Listen to the show to hear my description of how optimizing tools work.

Ad Blockers and Do-not-track Technology

Annie explains how ad blockers and do-not-track tools impact your analytics data differently.

If you run display ads on AdWords, then ad blockers will impact your overall effectiveness. As people choose to block ads, impressions and conversions will decrease. A lot of publishers,