Use Google Analytics To Guide Social Re-Sharing for Revenue

One of the questions social media practitioners ask most often is, “What links/content should I re-share more frequently?” We have so many choices before us. How do we decide?

Prerequisites: Goal Values

Before we assess which links to share, we need to know what business goal we’re seeking. I seek revenue. As a small business owner (my ‘side hustle’ microscopic publishing empire), I want revenue first and foremost. Everything else is gravy; revenue is priority.

To that end, I set up my personal Google Analytics to track revenue generated, both direct (via Gumroad’s eCommerce integration) and inferred (Amazon net revenue divided by number of clicks to Amazon in a given timeframe) as goals and goal values.

If you haven’t ever set up goals and goal values before, here are three blog posts which can help guide you:

Sharing Referrals

The first place to check for valuable links to share in social media is in Referrals:

Go to the Acquisition menu in Google Analytics (1).
Choose All Traffic (2).
Choose Referrals (3).
Re-sort the results by revenue (4).

What we see above are someone’s newsletter (5), Scott Monty’s weekly roundup (6), Roger Dooley’s interview with me (7), and my marketing podcast, Marketing Over Coffee (8).

I can drill down into each of these results to copy the URL that generated the revenue, then re-schedule (as appropriate) revenue-generating content. If you don’t get usable results the first time you do this exercise, expand the timeframe in the upper right.

Sharing Campaigns

The second place to check for valuable links to re-share in social media is in Campaigns:

Go to the Acquisition menu in Google Analytics (1).
Choose Campaigns (2).
Choose All Campaigns (3).
Re-sort the results by revenue (4).

What we see above are the top campaigns I’ve run which generated revenue. Most of them are email marketing; a few are social media. Since I know which products were featured in those pieces of content, I can create either permanent landing pages featuring that content for re-sharing, or create new content re-using the best performing content snippets. I’d then re-share those URLs.

Sharing Content

The third place to check for valuable links to re-share in social media is in Pages:

Go to the Behavior menu in Google Analytics (1).
Choose Site Content (2).
Choose All Pages (3).
Re-sort the results by Page Value (4).

What we see above are pages on my site which have the highest page value, meaning they drove the most revenue either directly or indirectly. These are blog posts for the most part; I should include these in re-sharing to test whether they continue to drive revenue as long as the content is relatively evergreen.

Conclusion

Social media sharing is a powerful tactic to help achieve our business goals. Once we are clear what our primary business goal is, we can measure it in Google Analytics, identify the referring traffic, campaigns, and content which help advance that goal, and re-share it frequently.