Social Meets Web Analytics

You’ve heard it time and time again: content sells. Knowledge is currency. And sharing information, insights, and expertise on your industry can be a powerful way to engage your community and customers. But what’s working? Is your content driving website traffic and conversions? Is other people’s content about you pushing people to your site? Is your positioning lining up with what’s motivating your audience to click? Radian6 can help you find out.

With our web analytics integration, linking social media content to referred website traffic, conversions, and leads is easier than ever before. *

For a quick look, just sort your River of News by new visitors to your website, and note which posts are responsible for driving significant traffic and visitors to your website:

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Then, do some deeper digging beyond just traffic. Using the conversion criteria you specify, see whether a popular blog post that captured lots of eyeballs also caused people to convert, whether you’ve defined that as a newsletter signup or an e-commerce sale:

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When you investigate your Topic Profile content further and read through, what keywords surround the mentions and discussion of your brand? Are they the ones you expected and are messaging to your community? Are they different? Use the Topic Analysis widget to line up keywords with web metrics within your topic profile and see.

Take a close look at the keywords that are performing best for the website activities you want most. Let’s say you’re an accounting firm, and in your communications, you tell people you’re in the business of “home renovation services”. Check and see how many visits to your site that keyword generated versus how many conversions it delivered. Look at the ratio of visits to conversions, too.

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Then, add in some of the words and phrases that appear in content or articles on the social web that mention your company. Perhaps you see content referring to you as a “cabinet replacement contractor”, so you add that keyword to your mix, and do the same comparison:

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Does that new term drive less visits but a better ratio of conversions? Or does your wording and description perform better? Perhaps you’re getting tons of traffic, but for a term that doesn’t really describe what you’re all about. You’ll discover ways to enrich the content you create, and determine whether the lens through which the social web sees you reflects your perceptions and attributes of your own brand.

One step further still: Put your website stats side by side with social media metrics. Take that same set of keywords, but now, analyze it first by comment count. Then look at it, say, by time spent on your site. Do the keywords that generate lots of comments and engagement also cause people to linger on your site for a while? Check it against conversions, too. Can you draw a dotted line between lots of comments around a keyword and content topic, and conversions on your website?

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Doing this kind of analysis – layering web statistics on top of social media content and metrics – can help you refine your social media strategy to better align with your business focus, and better meet your community’s expectations for what they’ll get when they find your site. And you can determine what content and messaging is actually converting, regardless of whether or not you created it, so you can create and encourage more of it.

No longer do you have to guess at what content is really driving awareness, engagement, or revenue in context of your website. Radian6 will help you connect the dots.

* note: current web analytics integration is available for Google Analytics, WebTrends and Omniture customers, with new integrations planned for the near future. Ask your Radian6 account rep how you can activate Google Analytics, WebTrends or Omniture integration for your account.

Download the PDF version of Social Meets Web Analytics with Radian6 here.

Interested in hearing what people are saying about your brand? Click here to get started now with Radian6.