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Can You Use Google Analytics for Social Media?

Cody Schneider•

Yes, you absolutely can - and should - use Google Analytics to track your social media performance. While your favorite social apps show you likes, comments, and shares, Google Analytics reveals what happens next, connecting your social media activity to actual business results like website traffic, new leads, and sales. This guide will walk you through exactly how to set up and analyze your social media data in Google Analytics, from uncovering built-in reports to creating custom tracking URLs that give you laser-sharp insights into your campaigns.

Why Use Google Analytics for Social Media?

The analytics inside platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn are great for measuring on-platform engagement. They tell you who is interacting with your content and how. But their insight nearly always stops the moment a user clicks a link to your website. That’s where Google Analytics comes in.

Think of GA4 as the unbiased referee that shows you the full story. It picks up where social platforms leave off, telling you:

  • What users do after they arrive: Do they bounce immediately? Do they read blog posts? Do they sign up for your newsletter? Do they make a purchase?

  • How social media compares to other channels: You can see - all in one place - whether your social media efforts are more or less effective at driving sales than your email marketing, organic search traffic, or Google Ads. This is impossible to see from within a single social platform.

  • True ROI: By tracking conversions and revenue, you can attribute a real dollar value to specific social campaigns, helping you understand where to invest your time and budget for the best return.

In short, on-platform analytics measure audience engagement with your content, while Google Analytics measures the business impact of that engagement.

Where to Find Social Media Data in Google Analytics 4

Out of the box, Google Analytics automatically categorizes some of the traffic coming from social media sites. You can find this data in the standard traffic acquisition reports.

The Traffic Acquisition Report

The easiest place to get a high-level overview of your social media traffic is the Traffic Acquisition report. This report groups all your incoming traffic into broad categories, making it simple to compare performance across different channels.

Here’s how to find it:

  1. In your GA4 property, navigate to Reports on the left-hand menu.

  2. Click on Acquisition, and then select Traffic acquisition.

  3. By default, the report will display data broken down by the "Session default channel group" dimension. Look for two specific rows: Organic Social and Paid Social.

Organic Social includes users who clicked a link from an unpaid post, a profile bio, or a shared link from a social media site. Paid Social covers users who arrived from a paid ad you're running on a social platform.

In this view, you can see key metrics like Users, Sessions, Engaged Sessions, and, most importantly, Conversions and Total Revenue for each channel. This is your command center for understanding social media's fundamental contribution to your goals.

Source/Medium Drilling Down

The default channel group is a nice summary, but what if you want to know if Facebook is outperforming LinkedIn? To get more specific, you can look at the "Session source / medium" dimension.

In that same Traffic Acquisition report, simply click the drop-down arrow above the first column (currently set to "Session default channel group") and select Session source / medium.

Now, instead of "Organic Social," you’ll see specific sources, such as:

  • facebook.com / referral

  • t.co / referral (this is Twitter/X)

  • linkedin.com / referral

  • instagram.com / referral

This gives you a much clearer picture of which individual platforms are sending you the most valuable traffic. However, you'll soon notice this report has limitations. It can’t tell the difference between a click from your profile bio, a specific post, or an Instagram Story. For that, you need a more powerful tool.

Level Up Your Tracking: UTM Parameters for Social Media

Standard reports offer a good starting point, but they can't tell you the context of a click. The key to unlocking truly granular, actionable insight is using UTM parameters.

UTM parameters, short for Urchin Tracking Module parameters, are simple tags you add to the end of a URL. These tags tell Google Analytics extremely specific information about each click - like which campaign it came from, which social post was clicked, and even which specific link in that post was used.

They might look complicated, but they’re incredibly easy to create and transform messy data into clear, campaign-level insights.

The Holy Trinity of UTM Parameters

While there are five possible UTM parameters, you only need to focus on three for 99% of your social media tracking needs:

  • utm_source: Identifies the source of your traffic. Think of it as the specific platform the user came from. Examples: facebook, instagram, linkedin, tiktok.

  • utm_medium: Explains the type or category of traffic. For social media, common mediums are social (for your organic posts) or cpc (Cost Per Click, for your paid ads).

  • utm_campaign: Names the specific marketing campaign. This is where you get descriptive. Examples: summer_sale_2024, webinar_promo_july, new_product_launch.

Consistency is everything here. Decide on a naming convention and stick to it, because facebook and Facebook will show up as two separate line items in your reports.

Optional but Useful Parameters

There are two other parameters you can use to get even more granular:

  • utm_content: Used to differentiate links that point to the same URL within the same campaign. This is perfect for A/B testing. For example, you might use blue_ad_creative and red_ad_creative to see which ad performs better, or profile_link vs. story_link to see which placement is more effective.

  • utm_term: Typically used in paid search campaigns to track specific keywords. It's less common for social media tracking, but you can use it to identify audiences if needed.

How to Create UTM-Tagged URLs

You don't need to manually type these URLs out. Google provides a free and easy tool called the GA4 Campaign URL Builder.

Let's walk through an example. Imagine you’re running a summer sale and you want to post a link in your Instagram Story to promote it.

  1. Website URL: https://www.yourshop.com/summer-sale

  2. utm_source: instagram

  3. utm_medium: social

  4. utm_campaign: summer_sale_2024

  5. utm_content: story_link

Plug these into the URL builder, and it will generate the following URL for you:

https://www.yourshop.com/summer-sale?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=summer_sale_2024&utm_content=story_link

That URL is long and ugly, so it's a good idea to run it through a link shortener like Bitly before posting it. The UTM tags will remain intact and tracking will work perfectly.

Pro Tips for Smart Naming Conventions

Poor UTM management can quickly lead to a messy, confusing report. Avoid that headache by following these rules:

  • Stay Consistent: Always use lowercase letters. As mentioned, linkedin and LinkedIn are read as two separate sources by GA4.

  • Use Dashes or Underscores: UTMs can't contain spaces. Use spring-sale or spring_sale instead of "spring sale".

  • Keep a Record: Use a simple spreadsheet to document the URLs you create. This makes it easy for you and your team to stay consistent over time.

  • Be Descriptive but Concise: Your campaign names should be easy to understand at a glance. What would make sense to you six months from now?

Analyzing Your Custom Social Campaigns in Google Analytics

Once you’ve shared your UTM-tagged links and traffic has started coming in, it's time to see the results. Navigate back to the Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition report.

This time, change the primary dimension to Session campaign. Voilà! You'll now see a list of all the campaign names you created with your UTM builder. Now you can answer incredibly specific questions, such as:

  • "Did my Spring Sale promotion on Instagram ('spring_sale_ig') generate more revenue than my promotion on Facebook ('spring_sale_fb')?"

  • "Of the four influencer campaigns I ran last month, which one drove the most new user signups?"

  • "Did the link in my TikTok bio (profile_bio_link_v2) perform better than the link in last week’s video post?"

By adding secondary dimensions like "Session source / medium" or looking for the "Session manual ad content" dimension (where utm_content data appears), you can dig even deeper to understand not just what campaigns are working, but which platforms and creative executions are driving that success.

Don't Forget Conversions: Tracking What Really Matters

Tracking traffic from social media is one thing, but knowing if that traffic actually moves your business forward is another. For your social media analytics to be truly meaningful, you need to have conversions set up in GA4.

A conversion is any action on your website that you consider valuable. Examples include:

  • A user completing a purchase.

  • Someone signing up for your newsletter.

  • A prospect filling out a "Contact Us" form.

  • A click on your "Request a Demo" button.

In GA4, most interactions on your site are captured as events. You can view these events by going to Admin > Data display > Events. To track what’s important, you simply toggle on "Mark as conversion" for the events you value most (like purchase or generate_lead).

With conversions enabled, all of your acquisition reports become infinitely more powerful. You’re no longer just measuring clicks, you're measuring how your social media efforts contribute directly to your business goals.

Final Thoughts

By moving beyond easily gameable vanity metrics and into Google Analytics, you can finally prove the value of your social strategy. Using standard reports for a quick overview and UTM tags for deep campaign analysis gives you a complete picture, empowering you to make data-driven decisions about where to focus your marketing energy.

Juggling all this data between social platforms and Google Analytics can still be a heavy lift. As our team spent more and more time pulling data and manually building these reports, we knew there had to be a better way. That's why we created Graphed. It connects directly to your Google Analytics, social ad accounts, and other data sources, letting you create real-time, consolidated dashboards just by asking questions in plain English. Now you can get all your insights in one place, instantly updated, without any of the manual wrangling.