A successful social media campaign regularly shares high quality information.

Google Analytics is a familiar tool to most businesses who are interested in monitoring the activity on their website. Analytics is a great way to determine what sort of traffic your business is getting online and which features on your website are most effectively engaging visitors. But analytics has a flaw: the reports only allow you to see the activity that is occurring on your website – or at least it used to. On March 20, Google announced that it would soon be adding social reports to analytics, which allows businesses to measure their activity and engagement with customers online beyond their websites.

The new addition of social reports will be a great asset to businesses that are putting more effort into social media marketing because they will enable marketers to track their progress and determine how each specific social network is contributing to overall success. Google says that the new social reports will be outcome-oriented, meaning that they will tell you how your efforts are translating into desired outcomes (such as how many visits from a social network become conversions). This focus is especially useful in determining how successful your social media efforts are because the ultimate goal is to get people to convert, which usually occurs on your business’ web page.

With the new social reports, you’ll be able to visualize the impact that social media is having on your business and develop a social media plan based on hard data. To begin with, the social reports will allow you to see the traffic coming to your website from social networks and which networks specifically are contributing to conversions. The reports will also provide you with a picture of your social media activity and interactions with customers everywhere online, giving you specific information about engagement. You will have access to all of this information about your business in a series of reports that are easy to understand.

For an overall view of conversions that result from social media efforts, you can turn to the overview report. Within this report, Social Value Visualization depicts how many goal completions you have had and the monetary value of these completions in comparison to conversions generated from social networks. Additionally, sections titled Last Interaction Social Conversion and Assisted Social Conversion will respectively show you the immediate conversions from a social network and the delayed conversions from a social network (when someone visits your site and converts later). This information is essential because it provides you with details about the types of conversions your business is experiencing.