As business folks online, we’ve been hearing over the past couple of years that social media is the hot ticket and that we should get involved in a big way. Well… How big? And if you do, how do you know if what you’re doing is working? Are you spending too much time or too little time tweeting or Facebooking? (Yes, I made that up. Like it?) Are you getting any results?

By results, I mean are people subscribing to your list and/or are you making sales? This is HUGE! Not every social platform will work the same for every business. For example, a business might have success when they bookmark their blog posts at Reddit.com. Or, maybe your Tweeting is working to grab folks attention and get them over to your blog. And then, perhaps you have a fan page at Facebook that is driving sales. Do you know? And if you don’t, want to know how you can tell?

Figuring this out takes a short while to set up, but it’s not terribly difficult, and here’s the good news… You can get these stats free! No matter what type of web page you’re working with from a squeeze page to a blog, you can get this metric from Google Analytics. It’s important to not just add Analytics to your page, but also to set goals and to add the appropriate codes to pages in your funnel, as well.

So, goal one is that visitors opt in. Goal two would be a sale to that customer. Google will then display the results of your funnel, so this is a very easy way to tell what’s working for your site. You can set up to five goals, but make sure that you’re setting goals that will provide information that’s important. You may want to start with your front door, move to your optin, then on to your sales, your up sales, and your down sales. It’s really up to you. But for this article, we’re testing social platforms, so here’s what you do:

Set up a Custom Report, which will allow you to walk with your customer from the time they click the link that brings them to your page to when they buy your product.You do this from the results area, where you see stats for your site. Go to the bottom of the left-side navigation and you’ll see “Custom Reporting.” At the upper right-hand corner, click “Create new custom report.”

Start with the “Metric,” and click the drop down arrow.  Select “Goal 1 starts,” and drag it over to the dotted blue square area labeled “Metric.” (It’s tough getting it in there, if you don’t realize that you put the cross arrow into the blank box until it highlights the outline and then, drop the label into it.)
Then, give your goal a “Dimension” by clicking the drop-down for “Traffic Sources” and select “referral path.” Drag that over beside the green dotted area that says, “Dimension.”

Save your report and it will tell you how many optins you got from what source, and voila!  Finally, you get an idea of how many people successfully opted in and where they came from.

Then, above the Metrics area, select “+Add Tab,” and follow the same route to track sales and where they came from. Add Goal 2 as your metric. It should be the download page for your product. Then, add the dimension, referral path. That result will tell you how many sales you made and where those came from. Sweet!

After that, it’s a no-brainer, right? Decide which social sites are bringing the best results. Concentrate on those and ignore the rest, and you’ll see greater success. You can’t possibly join or participate in every one of them, so be sure to decide which ones make the most sense instead of spinning your wheels. That makes no sense at all.