[UA] About Social plugins and interactions [Legacy]

Many social networks provide embeddable buttons and widgets that allow users to easily share content from the web or from an app (e.g., the Twitter share button). User interactions with these embedded social buttons represent social interactions with your content. These social interactions are valuable signals of user engagement and can be measured using Analytics.

In this article:

Data collection

A social interaction, like a pageview, screen view, or an event, is a unique hit type that includes a set of unique values to describe the social interaction.

The Data Model

A social interaction in Analytics is represented by the following fields:

Field	Type	Required	Description
socialNetwork	string	Required	The social network being measured (e.g., Facebook, Twitter).
socialAction	string	Required	The social action the user is taking, e.g., “Like”, “Share”.
socialTarget	string	Optional	The content on which the social action was taken, e.g., the path of an article or video.

Measurement

A social interaction should be measured when a user completes an interaction with an embedded social button or widget.

For example, a developer could measure the interaction of a user with the Twitter button on a web page using the following values:

Each button or widget may have its own API with which developers need to integrate with to measure social interactions. Developers should refer to the API documentation provided by each social network for more information on how best to integration.

Collecting Social Interactions

Developers can collect social interaction data using the following client libraries or protocols:

Web: analytics.js
Android SDK
iOS SDK
Measurement Protocol

Reporting

After processing, social interaction data can be accessed via the Social Plugin report or custom reports in the web interface, or via the Core Reporting API.

The following are the social interaction dimensions and metrics available in Analytics:

Social Interaction Dimensions

Web Interface	Core Reporting API	Description
Social Source	ga:socialInteractionNetwork	a value representing the social network being tracked (e.g., Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
Social Action	ga:socialInteractionAction	a value representing the social action being tracked (e.g., share, like, bookmark)
Social Source and Action	ga:socialInteractionNetworkAction	a value representing the concatenation of the social network and action measured (e.g., Google: Share, Facebook: Like
Social Entity	ga:socialInteractionTarget	a value representing the URL (or resource) which receives the social network action.

Social Interaction Metrics

Web Interface	Core Reporting API	Description
Social Actions	ga:socialInteractions	The total number of social interactions.
Unique Social Interactions	ga:uniqueSocialInteractions	Number of sessions during which the specified social action(s) occurred at least once. Based on unique combination of network, action, and target.
Actions per Social Session	ga:socialInteractionsPerSession	The number of social interactions per session.

For the complete list of social interaction dimensions and metrics available via the Core Reporting API, see the Core Reporting API Social Dimensions and Metrics reference.

Example

The following end-to-end example will show how values are collected, processed, and made available via the various social interaction dimensions and metrics.

Collection

In this example, a single user shares two different articles from a website using an embedded Twitter "share" button. At collection time, the developer sends two social interactions to Analytics, one after each "share" is completed, with the following values:

Reporting

After processing, a custom report that uses social entity as the dimension and each of the social action metrics would look like this:

Social Entity	Social Actions	Unique Social Actions	Actions per Social Session
/articles/2012/june/article?id=5555	1	1	2
/articles/2012/june/article?id=6000	1	1	2

On the other hand, a custom report that used Social Action as the dimension with the same social action metrics used above would look like this:

Social Action	Social Actions	Unique Social Actions	Actions per Social Session
Twitter / Share	2	1	2

Unique Social Actions

In the example above, note that there is only one unique social action attributed to the network / action combination Twitter / Share. Even though the user interacted with two separate Twitter share buttons, they both had the network / action combination of Twitter / Share, which results in a single unique social action in the reports.

Actions per Social Session

Lastly, in the same example above, note that Actions per Social Session is calculated by dividing the total number of Social Actions, in this case, 2, by the number of unique social actions, in this case, 1.