Ways to estimate traffic from social networks?

Hi everyone,

I am using social networks as one of best methods to drive traffic to my business site but I'm getting confused about traffic come from social networks that I'm targeting. My question is there are any ways to estimate traffic from social networks?
As my experience, I often see them via google analytics, it's right way to calculate traffic from social media? but in many cases, google didn't show all analytics from networks.

Please share your suggestions

Hi Jordantyj,

I've found that G's analytical tools have some inaccuracies such as bounce rate times and not displaying all of the referring pages... If its wordpress try using the slimstat plugin and then compare that to analytics and you'll see what I mean... Also for Analytics to work better you will need to link it to your WMT account... I'm sure there is more to G's analytics as its an area that I need to investigate in more detail wrt the advanced features...

Another approach is if you are into programming is to capture all of the referral pages... I do that for email opt in pages as I want to track the URL origin of people signing up and place that as a hidden field within my autoresponder... So you could extend that with capturing the info and writing it to a database... For that I use PHP with using the $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] to capture that info...

Or alternatively use GET URL parameters on your source pages as an identifier... I do that too to better track traffic i.e. paid ads etc.... For that you need to append a parameter to end of URL e.g. www.mydomain.com?t=id - where id is of your choice.... This will be shown on your traffic reports as to landing page url ... with that you get a granularity of detail e.g. social media post 1 vs. post 2 or Adwords Ad 1 vs. Ad 2 is bringing in more traffic... So using GET URL parameters in this way will tell you exactly what is working best...

You could also combine that with link tracking tools - for that I use free/open source YOURLS as a self hosted solution... With that you simply create your YOURL links which then redirect to your page... A bit like tiny/bitly etc - but advantage being that its self hosted and the URL based on your domain.... You get great stats and you can see which traffic sources are working best... Keep creating different links and post them on your social media or where ever and you will be able to track your efforts like a pro!!!

Of course there are many other tracking/analytical tools... The ones mentioned is my preference - but I'm always open to hearing of what others are doing...

I hope that helps! Best of luck,


Sid