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.
The Google +1 Button was developed by Google as a way for people to recommend products, services, businesses, people, or anything else that may be found on a webpage that they might like. A website owner or business would add the button to their page or site and a visitor wishing to recommend the page or site to others would click the button when logged into their Google account. The network of that Google account user would then see that +1 when seeing the page or site come up in search or when visiting the page or site directly.
1. Search results (both paid and unpaid) can include the Google +1 Button.
2. The URL to be +1’d is identified in one of three ways (in the order that Google checks for the URL): href attribute, rel=”canonical” tag, browser displayed URL.
• The href attribute is in the code placed on your website.
• If for any reason, you copied the code and did not select a href attribute, Google will then check for any indication of your preferred canonical URL.
• If neither of the two above items is present, Google will use the URL as it is displayed in the address bar. This third method can cause errors due to variables being present in this form of link that would not be present in the canonical version.
3. The Google +1 Button is currently available in over 42 languages.
4. The Google +1 Button comes in 4 sizes (small, medium, standard, and tall) with the option of with or without count (the total number of clicks of the +1 button).
http://code.google.com/apis/+1button/#button-sizes
5. Google makes it easy to customize your preferred +1 Button code through their Create A Custom +1 Button page.
An example of the Google +1 Button, standard size without count, can be seen on MoreVisibility’s homepage:
https://www.morevisibility.com/
Contact us if you would like assistance with selecting and implementing social media buttons on your website.
Phew! Have you been having a hard time following all of the recent Google announcements the past few months? Yeah, you’re not the only one feeling that way. It seems that every time you check the Google blog, your feed reader, or your mobile device, you hear about a new feature or product offering from the search giant.
In the last few months alone, Google has introduced:
A few days ago, Google made yet another big announcement by introducing an improved way to track social interactions from your website within Google Analytics.
With some quick and easy customizations to the Google Analytics tracking JavaScript, you can now track Facebook likes, Twitter shares, and other social media bookmarklets that live on your site in this new social reporting section.
It’s even easier to view interactions for websites using the Google +1 button, because Google Analytics can automatically track +1’s on your site!
The next time you log-in to your Google Analytics account, you will find within the Visitors section a link to Social. Inside of the Social link, you’ll see three new reports:
– Social >> Engagement: A breakdown of what social interactions your website visitors have performed, including Google +1’s and any custom interactions, like Facebook likes. Visitors who don’t interact socially on your website will be defined as “Not Socially Engaged”.
– Social >> Action: The source and the action performed by a socially-engaged visitor. Likes, shares, follows, and more will appear in this report. You’ll also see metrics like Unique Social Actions and Actions per Social Visit to help you analyze on-site performance by socially engaged visitors.
– Social >> Pages: Each social action can be tied back to a specific page on your website that a visitor’s social interaction took place from. This way, you can assign additional value to pages that lead to high volumes of social interactions, or improve upon pages that don’t.
While this section is a great way to obtain deep insights on your social visitors, you should still tag your shortened URLs for Google Analytics, to track the interactions on shared items on social media websites that lead visitors back to your website.
Social reporting is available to all Google Analytics users, so get engaged with social today!
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