Ever wonder how to measure your social media ROI? Sure, lots of expensive products will do it for you! I won’t name them to protect the innocent, but what I can say is that you can get highly insightful metrics for free using Google Analytics, and they are just as powerful as the services you pay for. It’s an odd bit of marketing arbitrage in the web analytics world, so you should take full advantage of it.

Basically, you need to create a custom filter which captures referral traffic from social media sites and then report that against whatever metric you use for ROI, such as goals, or visits, etc.

You can also do it with some on the fly filtering on existing reports, but I actually recommend using a custom filter and custom report.

Samir Balwani at Search Engine Watch describes this with a decent amount of detail, so if measuring social media ROI is your goal, check out his post.