Google Analytics has been improving the way you measure social media steadily over the past year. From the original social Media reports to multi-channel funnels, Google Analytics has more or less led the way in social media reporting. Today, they’ve improved it once more.

Google Analytics has added two new reports based on the data they’ve been collecting from their social data hub partners. The two new reports are Data Hub Activity and Trackbacks. Strictly speaking, neither report is new. They were available in the Network Referrals and Landing Pages reports when you clicked on a special icon that appeared if information from Data Hub partners was available.

Introduced last May, the Trackbacks report was previously available inside the Social reports. It shows sites that link to your content and in what context those sites refer to yours. However, Google has now expanded on the Trackbacks report displaying the number of visits that were driven based on those specific links.

Why, then, would Google choose to break out two new reports that previously existed? You have a better way of analyzing this information when they are in stand-alone reports. Each report has been expanded. And, of course, each report can be analyzed more deeply when you apply various segments to your data.