You can track what an individual/sub-set of social media posts contribute to website traffic and eventually donations. You can add “campaign parameters” to a URL that tells Google Analytics that helps uniquely identify a piece of content for tracking purposes. In Google Analytics you can filter by these parameters to see their contribution. You’ll want to figure out a naming convention that makes sense to you.
Google’s URL Builder
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en
Best Practice: Add a campaign parameter to any URL you post on social media (or give another website to link to your site).
You can also get alerts through Google Analytics to measure social media interactions. This is useful when running a campaign that has a start and end date. To do this, you sign into Google Analytics and heard into alerts. Set-up an alert for significant increases in day-to-day traffic for Facebook and you will get email updates when traffic becomes heavier.
Setting Up Alerts in Google Analytics
- Log into your Google Analytics account; Select the account/website you wish to set an alert for.
- Click the Settings button in the upper-right corner.
- Under Profiles, click Assets > Custom Alerts > Create an Alert.
- Under Alert Name, enter something that will be easy to recognize when you receive the email.
- The Period will depend on how long your promotion is running. For short promotions, a day works well.
- Under This Applies To, select Traffic Sources > Source, and under Conditions select Contains Twitter. This will send you alerts about the traffic you’re receiving from Twitter. You can play with these options to receive different alerts about different outlets such as YouTube, Pinterest or Facebook.
- Under Alert Me When, select Visits and under Condition select a number that makes sense for you. If you’re looking for spikes in traffic, you will want to put Previous Day as the Compared To value. For this one, I chose 50% more traffic than the previous day. (socialmediaexaminer.com)