Sending social interactions via measurement protocol in Google Analytics
Last Updated: May 30, 2020
This article is related to measurement protocol in Google Analytics.
If you are brand new to measurement protocol, then read this article first: Understanding Google Analytics measurement protocol.
In this article, I will show you how to send social interaction data (Facebook likes, Twitter tweets, etc) via measurement protocol.
In Google Analytics, social interactions (or social network interactions) can mean:
- Facebook likes
- Facebook unlikes
- Twitter Tweets
- Twitter Follows
- Twitter Retweet
- Twitter Clicks, etc.
These social interactions are measured by tracking the number of times a user clicks on social sharing buttons embedded on a web page.
Social interactions are made up of the following type of data in Google Analytics:
#1 socialNetwork – the social network on which the interaction occurred.
#2 socialAction – the type of social interaction that occurred.
#3 socialTarget – URL of the web page where the social interaction occurred. The value of socialTarget is usually a URL but it can also be any string.
The socialNetwork field can have the following values:
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Disqus
- Stack Overflow
- Pocket
- it
- Quora
- Netvibes etc
The socialAction field can have the following values:
- like
- unlike
- click
- tweet
- follow
- retweet etc
In order to send social interactions data via measurement protocol, use the following protocol parameters (in addition to the four required parameters) in the payload data:
#1 Social Action
Social Action is denoted by the ‘sa’ parameter. The value of this parameter should be a text string. For example:
sa=like
As in:
v=1&t=social&tid=UA-1500844-34&cid=4bae429a-8589-4d89-91d9-c3f45f2b58e2&sa=like
&sn=facebook&st=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.optimizesmart.com%2Fanalytics-consultation%2F
#2 Social Network
Social network is denoted by ‘sn’ parameter. The value of this parameter should be a text string. For example:
sn=facebook
As in:
v=1&t=social&tid=UA-1500844-34&cid=4bae429a-8589-4d89-91d9-c3f45f2b58e2&
sa=like&sn=facebook&st=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.optimizesmart.com%2Fanalytics-consultation%2F
#3 Social Target
Social target is denoted by ‘st’ parameter. The value of this parameter should be a URL encoded text string. For example:
st=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.optimizesmart.com%2Fanalytics-consultation%2F
As in:
v=1&t=social&tid=UA-1500844-34&cid=4bae429a-8589-4d89-91d9-c3f45f2b58e2&sa=like&
sn=facebook&st=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.optimizesmart.com%2Fanalytics-consultation%2F
Once you have created the payload data, ask your developer to write an application (program) which make the following similar HTTP POST request to the GA server:
User-Agent: user_agent_string
POST https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?payload_data
For example:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/30.0.1599.69 Safari/537.36
POST https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=social&tid=UA-1500844-34&
cid=4bae429a-8589-4d89-91d9-c3f45f2b58e2&sa=like&sn=facebook&
st=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.optimizesmart.com%2Fanalytics-consultation%2F
This HTTP POST request will send the payload data (which contains the social interactions data) to Google Analytics.
Other articles on measurement protocol
- Sending pageview data via measurement protocol in Google Analytics
- Sending campaign data via measurement protocol in Google Analytics
- Sending event data via measurement protocol in Google Analytics
- Sending ecommerce data via measurement protocol in Google Analytics
- Creating and validating measurement protocol requests through postman
- Understanding measurement protocol validation server
Last Updated: May 30, 2020
This article is related to measurement protocol in Google Analytics.
If you are brand new to measurement protocol, then read this article first: Understanding Google Analytics measurement protocol.
In this article, I will show you how to send social interaction data (Facebook likes, Twitter tweets, etc) via measurement protocol.
In Google Analytics, social interactions (or social network interactions) can mean:
- Facebook likes
- Facebook unlikes
- Twitter Tweets
- Twitter Follows
- Twitter Retweet
- Twitter Clicks, etc.
These social interactions are measured by tracking the number of times a user clicks on social sharing buttons embedded on a web page.
Social interactions are made up of the following type of data in Google Analytics:
#1 socialNetwork – the social network on which the interaction occurred.
#2 socialAction – the type of social interaction that occurred.
#3 socialTarget – URL of the web page where the social interaction occurred. The value of socialTarget is usually a URL but it can also be any string.
The socialNetwork field can have the following values:
- Disqus
- Stack Overflow
- it
- Quora
- Netvibes etc
The socialAction field can have the following values:
- like
- unlike
- click
- tweet
- follow
- retweet etc
In order to send social interactions data via measurement protocol, use the following protocol parameters (in addition to the four required parameters) in the payload data:
#1 Social Action
Social Action is denoted by the ‘sa’ parameter. The value of this parameter should be a text string. For example:
sa=like
As in:
v=1&t=social&tid=UA-1500844-34&cid=4bae429a-8589-4d89-91d9-c3f45f2b58e2&sa=like
&sn=facebook&st=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.optimizesmart.com%2Fanalytics-consultation%2F
#2 Social Network
Social network is denoted by ‘sn’ parameter. The value of this parameter should be a text string. For example:
sn=facebook
As in:
v=1&t=social&tid=UA-1500844-34&cid=4bae429a-8589-4d89-91d9-c3f45f2b58e2&
sa=like&sn=facebook&st=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.optimizesmart.com%2Fanalytics-consultation%2F
#3 Social Target
Social target is denoted by ‘st’ parameter. The value of this parameter should be a URL encoded text string. For example:
st=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.optimizesmart.com%2Fanalytics-consultation%2F
As in:
v=1&t=social&tid=UA-1500844-34&cid=4bae429a-8589-4d89-91d9-c3f45f2b58e2&sa=like&
sn=facebook&st=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.optimizesmart.com%2Fanalytics-consultation%2F
Once you have created the payload data, ask your developer to write an application (program) which make the following similar HTTP POST request to the GA server:
User-Agent: user_agent_string
POST https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?payload_data
For example:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/30.0.1599.69 Safari/537.36
POST https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=social&tid=UA-1500844-34&
cid=4bae429a-8589-4d89-91d9-c3f45f2b58e2&sa=like&sn=facebook&
st=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.optimizesmart.com%2Fanalytics-consultation%2F
This HTTP POST request will send the payload data (which contains the social interactions data) to Google Analytics.
Other articles on measurement protocol
- Sending pageview data via measurement protocol in Google Analytics
- Sending campaign data via measurement protocol in Google Analytics
- Sending event data via measurement protocol in Google Analytics
- Sending ecommerce data via measurement protocol in Google Analytics
- Creating and validating measurement protocol requests through postman
- Understanding measurement protocol validation server
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