Unilyzer Dashboard Tracks Facebook Fanpage Traffic

Does it help to know which channel is working best for you?   Social Media Marketing can be time consuming, so after awhile you might ask yourself, “how should I spend my time and money in a way that gives me the most ‘bang for the buck’” ? Or, in CFO speak, “which channel is giving me the most ROI”?

Well, the answer is probably different for everyone, depending on your product, service, or content and depending on who is your target audience.  But, here is one way to get a good idea of which channel is best for you: line up key metrics for each of your social media networking channels like Facebook, Youtube,  & Twitter. Do this on a side-by-side basis, like in the image above.

I personally do this with my Unilyzer Dashboard because I understand things better and faster when they are presented using charts and graphs. Now, in this example,  “a picture paints a thousand words.”  I lined up three key analytics metrics, Visits, Stickyness, and Time On Site – all provided by Google Analytics, which is one data source for Unilyzer.  Now, I clearly see the difference in visitor behavior based on which social media channel they came from.

See how 60% of people visiting my site from Facebook stick around and spend an average of 10 minutes and 1 second on my site?  Now, see how only 67% of visits from Twitter stuck around (did not *bounce) and those that stuck around stayed for an average of 1 second, while 100% of visits from LinkedIn did not “bounce” and they stayed for 2 minutes and 1 second on average.

So, what does this tell me?  My interpretation: well, my tweets generated curiosity – but not real interest, while my facebook marketing efforts hit a home run (got to the right target audience), and my LinkedIn visitors are interested in my site as well. The ironic thing is that I spent most of my day watching my tweet deck!  So, what to do from here?

Well, now that I have insight, I can make adjustments to my overall social networking campaign. What I do know is that Facebook is the best social media marketing channel for my specific product and service.  It might be different for you, but line up your metrics and find out!

*Bounce: a term used by google analytics which means that a visitor came to your domain, then left within 5 seconds – therefore, they bounced off your site.

I could talk about social media marketing analytics, reporting, and metrics all day long, but to keep it real, let’s stop here.  Look for more articles on the Unilyzer Blog about how to use social media marketing analytics to help you monitor and manage your social media and inbound marketing campaigns.

As a final note, I realize that this approach to measure traffic is based purely on traffic metrics (quantitative measures) and doesn’t consider leads or branding (qualitative measures) related to social media marketing campaigns; however, this is a good start and a good approach for sizing things up.

Finally!  A Way to Track Your Facebook Fan Page

If only there was a way to track Facebook Fan Pages with Google Analytics…

As Facebook Fan Pages gain momentum as a leading Social Media Marketing outlet, the need to effectively track this medium becomes all the more important.  Up until very recently, the only way to monitor your Fan Page was through the extremely limiting Facebook Insights.  Insights provides page administrators limited data on visitor demographics and fan interaction but is unable to report on visitor statistics, traffic sources, keyword data and some of the other extensive reporting that Google Analytics provides.  Thanks to some crafty out of the box thinking by London based web developers Webdigi, the code has been cracked and now everyone can track their Fan Pages using Google Analytics.  In this post, we will show you how to track your Fan Page with a step-by-step guide, including the necessary links to generate your personal Google Analytics tracking code that will be installed on your page.  We will also introduce you to the Social Media monitoring tool Unilyzer and show you how it can be used in correlation with Google Analytics to extract even more detailed and valuable information from Facebook and other Social Media outlets.  Let’s get started. 

Google Analytics for Facebook Fan Pages + Unilyzer = Tracking Bliss

Once you complete the installation of Google Analytics on your Facebook Fan Page, take your tracking to a new level using the Social Media Monitoring Dashboard from the Unilyzer (www.unilyzer.com).  The Unilyzer is a data-to-dashboard tool that uses Google Analytics to pull data from a wide range of Social Media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well as social bookmark sites like Digg, Stumble and Delicious – using this data, the Unilyzer generates a personal dashboard with insightful charts and trending arrows which allows you to adjust your Social Media marketing efforts accordingly.  Before we tackle the process of tracking the Facebook Fan Page on the Unilyzer, let’s take a look at the following step-by-step guide you will need to follow to install Google Analytics on your Fan Page.

Google Analytics Installation Guide for Facebook Fan Pages

Installing Google Analytics on your Facebook Fan Page isn’t all that complicated, but you will want to closely follow the steps provided below as there are a few moving parts.  Luckily, the aforementioned web development company Webdigi (www.webdigi.co.uk/) has written up an extremely comprehensive “how-to” that will facilitate the process.  Let’s take a look at some excerpts from their article below.  If you’ve already installed Analytics to your page, scroll down to the “Unilyzer” section to learn how the Unilyzer, when used in correlation with Google Analytics, allows for an even more extensive tracking experience.

How to setup Google Analytics on your Facebook fan pages

“The workaround we use in our code is to include Google Analytics as an image instead of setting the standard Javascript. This method tracks every visitor to the custom facebook pages on Google Analytics. It required a combination of server side cookie management and an additional <img> tag to the bottom of the facebook fan page. Here are the steps to get Google Analytics working on your facebook fan page.

1) Setup Google Analytics account. If you already have one, create a new website profile. You can name it facebook.com or facebook.com/your_page_name. You will finally get your tracking code which looks like this UA-3123123-2
2) Create your custom img tag for each of your pages you like to track. EG: contact form, services, products etc. You can use our tool to create the Google Analytics link generator for Facebook pages.
3) Add the entire custom image html tag from step 2 to the bottom of each Facebook fan page that you need to track.

That is all there is to it! Google Analytics is not real-time, so you will need to give it some time. Approximately a day before you see the fruits of your “hard” work.”

For advanced users

“Use this method, if you don’t want to use our hosted link redirection as mentioned in the method above. You can download the entire source code which is just about three files to get this setup working on your own server (running PHP4.3 or above). The code is written in PHP and essentially creates the Google image tracking URL with the referrer, page information, ID, etc. The additional advantage of hosting this on your own server and domain is that visits from your website to your facebook fan page gets tracked, etc. You will also be able to customise further if you wish. Please do share any useful updates you apply to the tracking link code.

Facebook – Google Analytics Version 1.1 (Updated 21st Feb, 2010).  For advanced method – Download this code to use on your server.

If you don’t have a Facebook fan page yet, visit our tutorial for code and help on creating customised Facebook fan pages.

PS: We could not find any other source / blog that described how to get Google Analytics on Facebook fan pages! There is support for canvas pages and applications but nothing for Static FBML fan pages. Hope this helps and please leave your comments below.”

UPDATE:
1) A lot of users have asked how to track visits to the wall. Yes, this can be done. Please see the comments by iphp below.
2) Here is a screenshot to a staticFBML where the code should be placed

Source: http://www.webdigi.co.uk/

Google Analytics is now tracking your Facebook Fan Page – Wait, it gets better…

Facebook Fan Pages have really caught on as a great way for individuals and companies to create micro-communities of followers of their brand and/or cause.  Now that you have the capability of installing Google Analytics on your page, take the next step and use a tool that works with Google Analytics to even further enhance your tracking and monitoring efforts.  The Unilyzer (www.unilyzer.com) is just the tool you need if you are looking for even more in-depth reporting on your Fan Page and other Social Media channels.  We will first take a look at what the Unilyzer is and how it works before moving on to a more detailed explanation of how the Dashboard can be customized to report on specific information. 

The Unilyzer – a new comprehensive Social Media Monitoring and Tracking Dashboard 

A bevy of tools for tracking social media have been developed over the past few years, many of them quite effective in what they do.  With that said, they all have their shortcomings – too expensive, lack of reporting breadth, uninspired user interfaces, minimal tracking channel capabilities.  Some tracking tools are great but medium specific, reporting on only one Social Media outlet and requiring the user to manage multiple monitoring tools in order to get a truly clear vision of their Inbound Marketing efforts.  The new Social Media monitoring Dashboard Unilyzer, developed by Eman Bass, provides a great overall package combining a great user interface, numerous customizable data points, user-friendly functionality, and broad reporting on all of the major Social Media channels.  And now that Google Analytics can be easily installed to track Facebook Fan Pages, the Unilyzer is even more attractive as it offers the best combined analytical reporting of Fan Pages the market has to offer.  For more information about the Unilyzer’s tracking and reporting capabilities, visit www.unilyzer.com or click here to watch a short video that describes the Unilyzer’s basic functions.

All in all, the fact that we now have the capability to properly track Facebook Fan Pages is a very good thing and it will give Page administrators a level of insight that Facebook Insight does not.

Track Your Social Media Traffic in Seconds

Watch this Video About the Positive ROI of Social Media Marketing

Traditional forms of marketing and advertising are not working. Direct mailers and display ads are expensive and yield negative ROI. Bottom line they are a big waste of time and money. Social media on the other hand costs practically nothing and yields a positive ROI (14.5% in my personal experience) plus multiple positive side effects.

I personally recommend that small business owners spend 10 hours per week on social media marketing. You will see the return on this time ten fold if you do it consistently. If you don’t have 10 hours per week, there are plenty of companies that specialize in outsourced social marketing that can do it for you. You need to place high value on your blog, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. Take money you’re throwing away on print advertising and put it into your blog and social media accounts. It’s time and money well spent.

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• Clicks – indicates how many times the links on your website were clicked by visitors.

• Visits – the number of individual sessions initiated by your visitors.  A session is defined as a 30-minute window of time.  If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session.  Users who leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.

• Visitors (aka. Unique Visits) – the initial session by a user during any given date range is considered to be an additional visit and an additional visitor.  Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits, but not as additional visitors.  Visitors is a metric that attempts to count unique ‘people’ visiting your site.

• Pageview – a view of a page on your website.  If a visitor hits reload after reaching the page, this will be counted as an additional pageview.  If a user navigates to a different page, then returns to the original page, a second pageview will be recorded as well.  This is a count of every page that is loaded on your website, even duplicate pages viewed during the same session.

• Unique Pageviews – does not count the duplicate pageviews in one user session.  This provides a truer count of the different unique pages viewed by the visitor. In other words, the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.

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