Comments on: How balanced is your online media mix?

By: Hamayon

Hamayon — Sun, 15 Feb 2015 10:01:10 +0000

If one is getting good organic/search traffic then he should work on social traffic if he thinks “he have all eggs in basket” if he works on referral traffic then that would be a little risky, as most of referral traffic comes from other websites who link to you (sort of seo) if one is not good at it, then he should work on social rather then referral he have good organic traffic.

By: Tim Leighton-Boyce

Tim Leighton-Boyce — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 09:49:14 +0000

In reply to Paul.

Hi Paul, I take your point about tagging the links which you post yourself. But that aspect of ‘social marketing’ is a more sophisticated variant of the traditional ‘send out an email blast’ and not what I’m anxious about.

I suspect that the hidden power of ‘social’ lies in the amplification effect when someone spontaneously decides the mention your excellent service or offers and that is picked up by others. I would like to say ‘real power’ as opposed to ‘hidden power’, but my point is that the data is confusing and may be deceptive.

The kind of effects I’m talking about are the unexpected spikes which come when someone posts a link to an offer on forum like Monesavingexpert. Those tend to include referrer information and so they can be seen in GA, even though the link is user-generated and contains no tags.

If the same thing happens on Twitter, or in another context where apps are a common way of viewing the link, we know almost nothing about it.

If we could measure and value the benefits of that kind of spontaneous vote of approval — and not just relating to offers — I believe it could be used to prioritise improvements in user experience, content and customer service.

That sounds like a good thing to me. I’d just like to be able to prove it!

By: Dave Chaffey

Dave Chaffey — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 04:10:19 +0000

In reply to Paul.

Tim is certainly aware of this, but your comments will help others who read the post – so thanks Paul!

We have more guidance on campaign tracking in Google Analytics and how to segment different sources here:
http://www.smartinsights.com/blog/digital-marketing-strategy/marketing-campaigns-tracking/

We ran a poll that shows that tracking using parameters for social media is relatively rare (16% of respondents).

I’m not sure which group the new “social sources” in GA are placed – http://www.smartinsights.com/search-marketing-alerts/the-implications-of-google-1-for-marketing/ – I guess the “other” group?

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 23:57:06 +0000

Hi Tim, to avoid or at least minimise this issue, best practice would be to tag your links and then shorten them. Then you’ll get a more accurate picture of your traffic sources and more accurately categorise the “direct” traffic.

Google Analytics and Site Catalyst have traffic source tagging parameters, eg:
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578

By: Dave Chaffey

Dave Chaffey — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 17:50:38 +0000

Thanks very much Tim, for the reminder about some social media referrals being including in direct traffic – I have updated my explanation of direct traffic. That could be quite a big detail for many sites who are active in using social media to drive traffic.

Your article and link to the other data set is interesting. I took a look at our data from Hootsuite shortened URLs and see that around 60% of our visitors from social media aren’t direct from the social networks as referrers, but from apps and other sources. So those would be wrongly recorded in Google Analytics.

Yes, “unattributed” would be more accurate, but in the meantime your comments have helped explain what “direct” traffic may include.

By: Tim Leighton-Boyce

Tim Leighton-Boyce — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 17:26:19 +0000

Please can I pick up on one point of detail. The standard description of ‘direct’ traffic, which is repeated here, is far short of the truth. These days a lot of social traffic coming from clicks in mobile or desktop apps will also be attributed to ‘direct’. This is a growing problem.

I’ve written about it and shown a recent small sample of data here
http://www.cxfocus.com/index.php/google-analytics-tips/social-marketing-big-visitors/
with links to Thomas Baekdal’s bigger data set from a year ago.

Direct is an extremely fuzzy set of visits in Google Analytics these days. To make matters more confusing it is treated differently in Multi-channel Funnel reports compared to traditional GA attribution reports.

I wish they would re-name it as “unattributed”. That would be a much more descriptive word.