If you’ve ever questioned the effectiveness of your school’s social media marketing campaign, new updates to Google Analytics are designed to give you some answers. A recent makeover to the Social Report now enables you to accurately measure the return on investment of a social media campaign. In Google’s own words from its blog:

“The new reports bridge the gap between social media and the business metrics you care about – allowing you to better measure the full value of the social channel for your business.”

The revamped Social Reports, which can be found under the Traffic Source and Social tabs, will identify all the traffic coming from social sites and measure how these social channels are converting visitors to leads.

The Overview Report allows users to easily visualize how social media is directly and indirectly assisting with conversions. In the report below, the largest circle indicates your school’s number of total conversions, or leads. The dark blue circle shows you when social media was the last interaction before a visitor converted into a lead, while the lighter blue circle shows where a visitor interacted with your school via social media but didn’t convert into a lead until a later date.

The Social Sources Report is another great resource that allows you to measure the amount of user activity from each of your social media sites. This report will ultimately help determine which of your school’s social media channels is preforming best and what type of content preforms best on each of these channels.

The Social Plugins Report allows you to measure the social activity that comes from the social plugins on your website, such as clicking on a ‘Like’, ‘Tweet This’ or ‘+1’ button.

While all of the Social Reports listed above will show you the level of social activity on your school’s social sites, the Activity Stream Report will show you how people are engaging with your school across the Internet. This new report will show you the URL for the piece of content shared, how it was shared, where it was shared, and what a user said about it when they shared it with their community.

The livelihood of your school depends on people talking positively about it online – on your school’s social sites, on their personal social sites, and on independent review sites. Effective Student Marketing can optimize your school’s social media campaign, keeping your audience engaged until they’re ready to enroll. We can also monitor the chatter about your school on independent review sites and respond appropriately. See how Effective Student Marketing can use social media to boost your school’s enrollment with a FREE Social Media Analysis today!