With everyone posting content on their Facebook Fan Page and tweeting on Twitter, the question soon arises: How do we know what traffic from these social medial sites is due to a particular campaign we are running and how much is from our normal social media activities? In the world of Google Analytics, we call this segmenting traffic. In order for marketing professionals to be able to know if their campaigns are driving traffic and sales, a method must be found to track visitors from Facebook and Twitter and know if they are coming from our specific campaign. The good news is that there is a relatively simple way to modify your wall your posts and tweets so that Google Analytics can now track which marketing campaign they resulted from:

• Use a URL Shortner – You can include any GA tracking parameters in a full URL and then plug that into your favorite URL shortener such as Bit.ly.When you do that, the full URL with the parameters can be tracked by GA and your problem is solved!
• Example: If your full URL is: http://www.seo4anyone.com/blog/article.html?utm_campaign=fall-giveaway&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=micro-site then you simply paste this URL into Bit.ly and it will create a new URL that looks something like: http://bit.ly/qKOpWR
• Implementation Results: So when you now paste http://bit.ly/qKOpWR into your Twitter tweet or post in on your Facebook Fan Page Wall, you will now be able to see exactly how much traffic came to that page from this particular Fall Giveaway campaign.

If you need help constructing the URL parameters, you can use Google’s handy wizard to help you construct the long URL easily.

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