About this plugin
Socialized adds social media sharing buttons to your posts, pages, and custom post types that are automatically integrated with Google Analytics using campaign parameters. When a user shares your post using these buttons, they can share a vanity URL that is either automatically generated or customized by you and is specific to that button. When another user on social media then clicks on that shared link, the vanity URL redirects them to your page with analytics tracking automatically.
By adding campaign parameters to the destination URLs, you can collect information about the overall efficacy of these campaigns, and also understand where the campaigns are more effective. For example, your “Summer Sale” campaign might be generating lots of revenue, but if you’re running the campaign on several social media platforms, you’ll want to know which of them is sending you the customers who generate the most revenue.
Or if you’re running different versions of the campaign via email, video ads, and in-app ads, you can compare the results to see where your marketing is most effective.
The campaign parameters that are automatically added are sent to Google Analytics when a user clicks on one of the shared links, and the related data is available in the campaigns reports. Below is a list of the campaign parameters that are added and their possible values:
- utm_id – value: socialized
- utm_source – possible value(s): facebook | twitter | linkedin | bluesky | pinterest | email | vanity-url
- utm_medium – possible value(s): social | email | vanity-url
- utm_content – possible value(s): socialized-share-link
- utm_campaign – value: socialized | or define in Settings
- utm_term – value: Defined by typing in the text field in the metabox on the post or page | or the “Focus keyphrase” by Yoast SEO
- utm_creative_format – value: user-share-link
- utm_marketing_tactic – value: prospecting
Shortened URLs
This plugin can automatically shorten your URLs without using any external URL shortener services or APIs! This makes it so your website’s domain is still the one being shared. You can also customize your short URLs.
Your permalink struture will not be affected. The randomly generated vanity URLs are automatically created when you save the post. Learn more about custom campaigns in Google.
Analytics Ready
When users click on your shortened URLs that get shared out in the wild, they automatically have customized parameters assigned. Google Analytics 4 automatically picks up on the UTM parameters but other analytics platforms like Piwik, Matomo, and any other home-grown platform!
Performance Friendly
All images have been optimized, minified JS and CSS, and you can choose to disable FontAwesome if your site is already loading it. JavaScript loads in the footer either asynchronously or with deferred loading to prevent impacting your site’s performance score.
Simple HTML & CSS
If you want to customize the look and feel, the HTML and CSS are very simple so that they can be easily overridden by you.