Tracking social media sharing with Google event tracking

I mentioned a while ago some great training we had with Andrew Hood on Google Analytics.

The one big thing that we have followed up is setting up some event tracking. These are actions that involve some kind of interaction with a site usually involving clicking on something.

Helpfully the new version of Google Analytics has, under Content, an Events option.

So what have we done?

Recently, and much later than we should, we have put some share buttons on our website. We did not what to use Sharethis and similar tools as they are not as accessible as we would have liked.

So now we have buttons for Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Google+ with Delicious and Stumbleupon to follow shortly.

We also have sign-ups on each page to our email alerting system which we imaginatively called NAOdirect; plus a collated RSS feed.

We then added event tracking to each of these buttons, the email sign up and the RSS feed.

Now the amazing bit. If you go into event tracking there is an overview of how often each of these tools have been used. Which is nice.

There is another view by page so you can see how much and by which tool the content on a page has been shared.

So what are the scores on the doors?

The good news is that the email sign-up is extremely popular followed by Twitter with lesser amounts of Facebook and RSS.

So what does this tell us?

Well it helps indicate which channels are more popular with our users. Also it gives a bit of a feel as to the relative level of popularity of content.

So how useful is that! Very I would say.

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