Google Whisperer’s Guide to Identifying Social Visits in Google Analytics 4

The Google Whisperer is back again with another stop on our analytics journey. This month, it’s all about social media and the data behind it. One of the most vital features of a web analytics tool is analyzing a site’s traffic. Social media is a huge part of web traffic today and it’s important to be able to see how many visits are coming in from each platform. Looking at visits filtered by source and medium can shed a lot of light on how effective each platform is for your business.

As a matter of comparison, in the current version of Google Analytics there is an entire submenu of options specific to Social media under Acquisition.

GA4 offers a wealth of information, but it’s not immediately visible in the navigation. The easiest way to view your social visits is to go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. When the page loads, it sorts it by source/medium by default. This gives us a quick view of how visitors arrived on your site.

You can drill down further by using the search feature to narrow down by any keyword. For our purposes, we’re going to focus on the source and medium. In this first example, I narrowed down the visits based on the medium social. This gives us a high-level overview of how many visits from each social media platform are coming to your site.

We can go even deeper by searching on a specific social media platform. In this example, I searched for just Facebook traffic. This shows us which came directly from Facebook.com, which were referral visits, and gives a much more complete picture of how people find their way to your site.

Keep checking my Google Whisperer page for all of our Google Analytics 4 most up-to-date news and be sure to reach out with your questions. We’ll be back with more video walk throughs and guides soon.