How to Track Visitors and Sales From Facebook and Twitter Using Google Analytics

Published on August 12th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

About the Author Mitch (@mitchellharper) is the co-founder and CEO of BigCommerce. Way back in 2007 he built what eventually became BigCommerce as you know it. Today he runs the company alongside Eddie and along with our 100+ team members, is passionate about helping businesses succeed with e-commerce. Mitch spends time between our Sydney and Austin offices and is giving the keynote at TechConnect 2012 in Sydney on April 19th.

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When it comes to tracking visitors (including where they came from – Facebook, Twitter, a Google search, for example) and transactions for your online store, Google Analytics is king. It’s free and it’s an almost-enterprise-grade analytics package that already integrates into your BigCommerce store.

Here’s a quick video if you’ve never used it before:

… and here’s how to interpret and act on the data in Google Analytics:

Tracking visits and sales that originated from Facebook or Twitter (once you’ve integrated Google Analytics with your BigCommerce store) is easy. Here’s how.

Start by logging into Google Analytics, then click the “Traffic Sources” menu on the left:

Next up, click the “Referring Sites” option under the visitors menu:

Now on the right side of the screen you’ll see a few things:

1. A date range which you can click to change. Typically you want to look at your last 30 days of traffic to make any actionable judgements
2. A chart which plots traffic over the selected date range
3. A table which lists the websites that have referred traffic to you for the selected date range, like so:

Now in the example screenshot above, Facebook was the second most popular traffic referrer with 10,941 visits and Twitter was fifth with 1,190. If you don’t see Facebook or Twitter listed in your top 10 traffic sources then just search for “facebook” or “twitter” in the search box below the table, like this:

Finally, to track the most important metric of all – sales that resulted from Twitter and Facebook, you can just click the “Ecommerce” tab that appears above the list of referrers, like this:

Remember: you should have already integrated Google Analytics with your store, otherwise you won’t see the e-commerce tab.

You can then see visits, revenue, transactions, average value, ecommerce conversion rate and per visit value for each of your traffic sources, including Facebook and Twitter:

Pretty neat huh? No more guessing if all that effort you’re putting into social media is affecting your bottom line from now on

By the way: If you’re looking to get started selling online and want to track your traffic and sales from Twitter and Facebook then give our e-commerce software BigCommerce a try, free for 15 days.

Try BigCommerce free for 15 days and see why it's loved by over 10,000 successful businesses.