Last week, Google announced that they would be adding a social-media tracking feature to its Google Analytics product. Now, publishers can identify which social media platforms direct the most traffic back to your website, and see how those visitors behave.

Social Media Examiner did a great write up of all the new features, but here’s the most important stuff.

Identify Traffic Sources

First, you’ll want to identify your top social media traffic sources. To do this, go to the Traffic Sources section and select Sources > All Traffic. Take a look at the list of referrers, and identify the top 2-3 social networks. For most of you, this will likely be Facebook (Facebook.com/referral) and Twitter (t.co/referral).

Create Advanced Segments

Once you have identified your main social media traffic sources, you can analyze visitors from those sites individually, using the Advanced Segments tool.

To do this, click on Advanced Segments from any Google Analytics report and click + New Custom Segment.

This is where it gets a bit tricky. Depending on which social network you’d like to track, you’ll want to include traffic sources to your Advance Segment based on user behavior. For instance, Twitter users often use third-party applications (like Mobile Twitter, Hootsuite, or Tweetdeck) to browse the platform. To get a good measure of your Twitter traffic, those sources should be included in the report using an ‘OR’ statement.

Once you add all your filters, press the Test Segment button to see if everything is set up correctly.

Social Media Traffic

Here are a few of the referring domains that you should remember to include in your Advance Segment filters.

• twitter.com
• t.co
• hootsuite
• tweetdeck
• bit.ly
• facebook.com
• m.facebook.com
• plus.url.google.com
• linkedin
• youtube
• reddit
• digg
• delicious
• stumbleupon
• Tumblr