Tracking Social Networking Traffic from Your Website

It's pretty much common sense to monitor the traffic your website receives from your social networking channels like Facebook, Twittter, and LinkedIn within your analytics platform. But, it's also important to measure how much traffic your social networking channels receive from links on your website. Since social networking links on your website are external links, most analytics platforms will not automatically track click throughs. Therefore, you need to append a piece of tracking code on all of the links to your social networking channels. For example, in Google Analytics, you can do this with campaign tracking. Create a campaign titled, "Social Networks", and label each Medium as the social network channel, and lastly label the Source as the webpage where the link is placed. By doing this, you can monitor how much traffic your website is sending to your social networking efforts and you will be able develop strategy for the placement of these links on your site.