This post is going to be a bit more technical than usual, but I thought I would take a stab at writing something a little more ‘hands on’. If you aren’t using Google Analytics already this post won’t be of much use to you. But, if you are, please read on.

So here is the use case. You have a blog (running Analytics), a Facebook page, LinkedIn and a Twitter account (basic hub and spoke model). You’re trying to understand if your social media tools are driving traffic to your blog.

The approach you will want to take is to use Google’s URL builder to build URLs that including tracking tags added to the links. The tags help you identify your referrers within Google Analytics. You would use these URLs on your various social profiles. For example on Twitter where it asks for your URL you could enter a unique URL to help track visits to your blog from Twitter.

Step-by-step:

Google's URL Builder

1. Visit Google’s URL builder page: GOOGLE URL BUILDER (http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578)

2. Enter the URL of your blog in the URL field (you could also enter a hidden landing page URL here – like a welcome page etc. For example link, click on the link from my Twitter account).

3. In the Campaign Source field enter a descriptive name of where you will be using the URL. For example if it’s for your Twitter profile enter ‘Twitter_Profile’

4. Campaign Medium: enter ‘Twitter_Profile’

5.  Campaign Term & Campaign Content: leave blank

6. Campaign Name: Enter ‘Twitter_Profile’

7. Hit the generate URL and copy the URL the tool created.

8. Go to your Twitter account and edit your settings. Copy the URL you just created into your ‘Web’ field. When users click on this link they will be redirected to your blog using the specially created tracking tags.

9. Voila! Once you have accumulated some visitors,  you should now be able to identify your inbound links in Analytics. Click on ‘Traffic Sources’ and under the ‘view Full Report’ area you should be able to see visits coming from ‘Twitter_Profile’. Those are visits coming directly from your Twitter account.

This technique can be used to track any inbound link campaign. You could generate tagged URLS for email campaigns, Facebook ads etc.

If you liked this post please leave a comment, as I could write more if you are interested.