Google today announced a new set of reports for Google Analytics that aims to help marketers determine the value of their social media efforts.  The new reports aim to help marketers in three main ways:

1. Identify the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions
2. Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs)
3. Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs

Of course tools have never really been the issue with determining the value of your social media work.  If you're looking purely to determine how social media activity links to sales for instance then this is always gonna be difficult because social media generally doesn't do well at delivering the last click before we buy something.

Nevertheless, the new reports do attempt to give you a better idea.  The key to realising the value in them is to correctly set up your goals in GA.  If you do this properly then you can learn whether social media assisted in a conversion or was indeed the last click convertor.

The new reports pull in data from a range of social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Quora.  If the data is in the public domain they will also pull the social conversation into the report, which is a nice feature, although of course they don't have access to Facebook and Twitter pulled their pipe recently.  With LinkedIn not available either it is a nice idea with limited current use if you use those three platforms heavily.

How was your content shared?

The social plugins report is a nice way to easily see how, when and where your content has been shared across social networks.

There is also a social sources report that's like a social version of the standard referrers report.  So you can see which networks send you the most traffic, how many page views and all the usual things you can see in your referrer reports.

So all in all it's a decent addition to the Analytics toolkit.  It won't make you understand your social media ROI any better if you haven't got a clear ROI in mind and can't figure out a way to turn that Return into a trackable goal in GA. 

It does also of course require that your goal is something that GA can measure, ie it has to occur on your website.  If for instance you're measuring successful customer service resolutions via your LinkedIn group or Twitter account then this won't be of much use.  A common problem with measuring social media ROI is the aggregation of data from lots of different sources into one place.  Whilst these new reports help to an extent they still apply a very Google centric approach to things.

If your business and method of tracking social media ROI fit into this relatively narrow construct however then these new reports will be a nice addition to your toolkit.  I suspect for many however it won't do that and will just be another way for markters to measure how many hits or shares they've had without measuring what really matters.