Google Analytics: Find your Social Media Activity, a Tour

Google Analytics does a lot for us, and it does so much that we can’t always find some of the cooler functionality.

I recently discovered some VERY useful information regarding social media linking in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics will let you review the social media discussions and events (+1, Like, Bookmaarks, etc) and do the usual stuff with it.

To find your Social Media actions in Google Analytics:

1. Log into Google Analytics and get to your Standard Reporting dashboard
2. In the left nav, navigate to: Traffic Sources -> Social -> Pages
3. Here you can see your most “Liked” content, but it gets better… (and the activity incoming from social networks)
4. Click on any of the “Pages” in the list, I clicked the first link
5. You can now see various Social Media networks that drive your traffic (“Social Referral”)
6. Click on “Activity Steam”
7. Here you land on the “Conversations” section, you can also click on the “Events” section (next to “Viewing” above the actual data)
8. Great — but there’s more…
9. Click on “ALL” under the “Pages” title (top left corner) — this can be done under events and conversations

Using this you can see all social media conversations sending links to your site, as well as all actions (and sometimes which user) that saved/liked/plussed your site.

Tags: Activity Stream, Analytics, Events, Google Analytics, reporting, SEO, Social Media, Social Referral

HTML5 Video – Attributes and Events

When working with the new HTML5 video tag, the official documentation is very confusing.  We just want a list of attributes and events!

I ran across an excellent resource, HTML 5 Video – DOM Attributes and Events at chipwreck.

From the post (this is incomplete, please go to the source for a full list):

Display attributes

src(string): The source file

poster(URL): An image to display before the video is playing

controls(boolean): Are the playback-controls being provided by the browser?

videoWidth, videoHeight(integer): The original video size

Playback attributes

currentTime(float): The current playback time in seconds

startTime*(float): The video start time (if the video does not start at 0.0 – streams for example)

duration(float): The duration in seconds

paused(boolean): Is the video currently paused?

ended(boolean): Has the video ended?

autoplay(boolean): Is is set to autoplay?

loop(boolean): Is is set to play in a loop?

They list everything beyond that .. thanks guys!

Tags: attributes, Events, HTML, HTML5, Video

Rich Snippets: How to properly list Reviews, People, Businesses, Events and Recipes for Google

Rich snippets let you share your reviews, people, businesses, events and recipes more accurately with Google.  Why do what helps Google?  Because Google will, in turn, help you.

If you properly implement rich snippets in either microdata, microformats or RDFa — you will see more traffic thanks to enhanced listings in Google.  Google provides useful snippets in search results that are more likely to draw the eye and attention of end users.

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Tags: Businesses, Events, Google, HTML5, microdata, microformats, People, RDFa, Recipes, Reviews, Rich Snippet, Rich Snippets Testing Tool, snippets, Traffic, xhtml