Google Analytics released an update this morning providing more details on use-cases for their new suite of social reports. In my last update on the social reporting suite, I primarily discussed the pending Activity Stream report as the most robust and exciting of the reports (which I still haven’t seen in person), but I have to say I’m starting to see a real benefit to some of the reports that I initially found underwhelming.
Social Sources
I’m finding this new report to be the most helpful. This helps to identify all of your social traffic sources in a way that not even a really thorough advanced segment could. In the below screenshot, you can see traffic from a wide array of sources, some of which I may not have thought to include in an advanced segment. What a great way to find new social opportunities!
Social Pages
Although this report is not as thorough as the social pages report already provided by Google Analytics in an older update, it is a very nice, more succinct snapshot of which pages have the most interaction with social networks.
Old Social Pages Report
While this report is an oldie at this point, I still feel it is worth reviewing in the context of these other new reports. This is very similar to the new social pages report, except that it breaks down the social interaction by the actions you are tracking on your website, which to me is a little more insightful.
The new social pages report is also including social interactions with other social sites it is partnering with even if you don’t have their button installed on your site (i.e. if it is being shared on Blogger even though users aren’t clicking on Blogger share buttons on your site), but at the moment I don’t see a great way to break it down by which social source is interacting with which page. It would be great to see a “Secondary dimension” drop-down option in these reports just like you can do with 99% of the other reports in Google Analytics, so that you can view sources for these interactions. We are submitting this suggestion to Google and hopefully will see a solution in the next round of updates.
Any other features you’d like to see in these new reports?