Hungry for Social Backlink Data? Google Analytics Social Reports Add More to Chew On

Great News, But Why Should I Care?
How in the World do I Read All This Data?
Why You Should Leverage Social Backlink Data to Improve Your Site

The hunt for the almighty backlink just got a little easier. A few days ago, Google announced that it finally added backlink tracking to the social reporting feature for Analytics that it rolled out in March.

To understand why this spanking new feature is so cool, it’s probably worth rewinding a bit to note what exactly was added back in March. Google Analytics souped up the social reports feature on its platform so webmasters could use it to get a peek at how much traffic social media delivered to their sites and pinpoint the social sites from which those visitors came.

Before the change, there was already a “Social” tab in the Analytics dashboard, but it only revealed three categories of data: Engagement, Action, and Pages.

The update to social reports added more categories, and the expanded data was crazy useful. Go Google! But the search engine giant upped its game a few days ago when it tacked trackbacks to the (already extensive) new Social Reports tab info.

The idea of trackbacks is nothing new; after all, platforms like Blogger and WordPress have offered them for years. For those of you who aren’t in the know, trackbacks automatically give you the URL of sites that link to yours as soon as the link is created.

This helpful tool becomes vital when applied to social sharing sites, and the expanded data will now allow webmasters to use past data to craft content with the potential to go viral in the future.

Bottom line: If you’re crazy about traffic, you should care because the new backlink feature will get you lots more. Think about it. If you’re like many webmasters, then you’ve likely spent hours hunting down backlinks and trying to figure out where in the world they originated from on the referring site.

Conversely, you may have an internal analytics account with your web hosting company that shows your site had four visitors from Twitter, but you have no way of tracing the tweet that referred them or what the accompanying text, if any, had to say about your content when it linked to your site.

You may even have some expensive backlink monitoring program that gives you the scoop on all referring sites, and that’s cool. However, the sweet thing about the new backlink feature on Google Analytics Social Reports is that it’s crazy in-depth – and it’s free.

You can analyze your site’s backlinks to your heart’s content, scour titles of posts that people have shared, and even read snippets of conversations that your content started on social sharing sites all in one place.

But let’s get down to the real reason this addition to Analytics is so ridiculously important. The problem with old school trackbacks is that some platforms use them and some don’t. So when you have trackbacks enabled on your site or blog, and you see occasional links to sites, you’re only getting part of the picture. There’s no way for one person to surf around the ‘net and find each and every link back to pages on their site – especially when it comes to links on social sharing sites.

Googlebot to the rescue. The new backlink feature in Social Reports includes all trackbacks to your site, and it even shows you the original post, tweet, share, conversation – you name it – in which the link appeared. Then, that efficient little bot builds all kinds of nifty graphs for you to read, all right in your Analytics dashboard.

If you’re super pumped and ready to try the new backlink feature for yourself, you’d better hold your horses. It’s awesome, yes, but extremely hard to find. Here’s how to navigate to the backlink data in your Google Analytics dashboard. In the main left-hand sidebar, click on “Traffic Sources”, then “social”, and finally “pages”, like so:

Once you’re there, look in the main window and select a link from the list to find out about the sharing data and backlinks. When you’ve selected your link, you’ll be taken to a screen with a graph about the sharing data related to the link. Click the “Activity Stream” tab above the graph:

Okay, we’re close, but we’re not done yet. Once you’ve hit the “Activity Stream” tab, you’ll be presented with a list of all the conversations surrounding the URL you chose. Pretty cool, but not what we’re looking for. Look above the list for the “Events” tab:

Congratulations, you found it. Now you should see a list of all the links from bookmarking sites, social networks, and trackbacks to content on your site. Needless to say, navigating to this feature is a hassle at best and a pain in the $%^& at worst, but Google will (hopefully) make some tweaks and adjustments to the navigation sometime in the near future.

As seasoned Google Analytics users are painfully aware, there’s a lot of data that is classified as “not provided”, and it accounts for a disturbingly high amount of information displayed on the platform. Here are some sobering stats provided in a recent post on Poynter:

The “not provided” change dealt a crushing blow to webmasters who use Google Analytics to decipher the sources of their inbound traffic, so the new backlink feature in Social Reports is a cool drink of water in a desert of partial information.

It’s better to focus on social sites for information now, anyway. The Google Panda and Penguin updates ushered in an era where social sharing has become an important component of search engine ranking power, and quality content is the only thing that will get that job done.

When you use the social backlink information in your Analytics account, you can find out what your most-linked content is and replicate your success. You can also connect with your visitors and start a conversation. Engagement is key to survival in an interactive Web, and Google now measures your social impact like so:

According to Google, your social impact is made up of four key areas:

1. Sources

Where your traffic comes from

2. Social Plugins

Visitors’ use of social sharing plugins on your site

3.  Pages

The areas of your site people are sharing

4. Conversions

How much money all the social stuff is actually making you

You’ll get a real feel for how these areas converge and create your social impact value once you’re able to eyeball the graphs generated in the Social Reports tab of your Analytics account. When you combine the information with data compiled from Google’s new backlink feature, you can find out the value of traffic from certain social sources – which can add up to a whole heck of a lot if used wisely.

sumber ::: http://site-reference.com/articles/hungry-for-social-backlink-data-google-analytics-social-reports-add-more-to-chew-on/