Google Analytics gets new Social Media reports

As social media marketers – our job has just got a whole lot easier – well at least in terms of measurement and tracking.

Google Analytics is rolling our some new social media reports the their suite of web traffic reporting.

What specifically is of interest to me is that Google is now analysing how many shares each piece of your content gets.

Eg. Google +1’s.

But with the official Tweet button from Twitter, and Like button from Facebook – you will need to add an additional piece of code to get Google registering these shares..

However Google is reporting all shares from tools like ShareThis, Add this and a number of other social networks.

For the Facebook and Twitter buttons you need to add _trackSocial snippet of code to these buttons. You can dive in and check the full documentation here: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApiSocialTracking.html

This is what we have been waiting for, but it’s only the start. This will require careful review by your web team to get the absolute most out of this new social media tracking.

You can see the full blog post by Google on their Analytics blog.