Google +1 Button Tracking in Webmaster Tools

Darren Franks - November 30, 2011

For those keeping up with the “Google +1 Button” hype, you may have realized by now that you can access its associated data via Google Webmaster Tools:

From your dashboard, click to expand the “+1 Metrics” section; this will reveal sections on Search Impact, Activity and Audience. In this section, you will see:

The Search Impact report: Will show you the impressions (how many times have pages with the +1 button shown in search results). Will also display the clickthrough rate (how many people actually selected this page in search results). Important because you’ll want to be able to distinguish the effectiveness of using the +1 button on certain pages compared to others.

The Activity report: Allows webmasters to view how many times a page has been “+1’d” from a specific page or from search results.

The Audience report: Displays demographic data for the +1’s such as age location and gender.

As with much of the specific numbers in all of the metrics in Webmaster Tools, much of it is an “average” or an “aggregate” number. For instance, the data you are able to view in the categories above is only displayed if a certain number of people have clicked on your +1 button.  

Learn all about it from a recent Google Webmaster Central Blog post:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-reporting-in-google-webmaster-tools.html.