How to measure the effectiveness of your Facebook custom tabs

Add UTM tags (we’ll explain!) as another quiver in your Google Analytics arsenal

Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, cause organizations, brands, businesses, Web publishers — anyone with a Facebook page.

We’ve seen a lot of changes to Facebook tabs over the years, from the days they were really tabs (at the top of the page) to “tabs” in the left sidebar to the newfangled small boxes (called tabs) at the bottom of your Timeline cover image.

But even with the recent changes to Facebook pages with Timeline, there are several ways to measure traffic that’s coming from your Facebook Page custom tabs:

• Use a third-party URL analytics tool – You can created bit.ly links for each URL in your custom tab. The downside with this is that you have to manage another service for this analytics.
• Create a unique Web page – You can also create a unique Web page that receives visitors only from your Facebook Page custom tab. Although this is great from a messaging standpoint, it requires additional time and resources to build a new webpage on your site.
• Use UTM tags – UTM tags allow you to amend an existing URL with information so you can measure traffic coming from a specific website or medium, like an email, where you’ve placed that URL. Think of it as a homing device. (The term UTM stands for the way-too-geeky Urchin Tracking Module and is the format/coding that Google uses to track your unique urls. And, yes, you can use this Google tracking tool on your Facebook page.)

In the video above, I explain everything you need to know to get started with UTM tags.

Please add any additional tips you have in the comments.

John Haydon delivers social web strategy solutions for “the quick, the smart, and the slightly manic.” Curious? Then visit the John Haydon blog, follow him on Twitter or leave a comment.