Well, it is great to find out that at least some players in the industry are taken seriously the importance of information integration, the importance of having all the pieces of the puzzle available when creating the decision making scenario. A way to revert the situation displayed in “Top Performance Metrics“.
Last week Google released the +1 button, kind of a “Like” but for the Google+ Project. The best part of this released is that Google thought about integration from the beginning and you can measure the +1 button from Google Webmasters tools and Google Analytics understanding how +1 affect your traffic and traffic behavior.
Regarding Google Webmasters tools:
The Search Impact report gives you an idea of how +1‘s affect your organic search traffic. You can find out if your clickthrough rate changes when personalized recommendations help your content stand out. Do this by comparing clicks and impressions on search results with and without +1 annotations. We’ll only show statistics on clickthrough rate changes when you have enough impressions for a meaningful comparison.
The Activity report shows you how many times your pages have been +1’d, from buttons both on your site and on other pages (such as Google search).
Finally, the Audience report shows you aggregate geographic and demographic information about the Google users who’ve +1’d your pages. To protect privacy, we’ll only show audience information when a significant number of users have +1’d pages from your site.
Regarding Google Analytics, the good news is that is you configure the Javascript for Analytics, it reports not just the +1 but also other buttons allowing you comparing the different sharing actions by using Social Plugin Tracking in Google Analytics.
- The Social Engagement report lets you see how site behavior changes for visits that include clicks on +1 buttons or other social actions. This allows you to determine, for example, whether people who +1 your pages during a visit are likely to spend more time on your site than people who don’t.
- The Social Actions report lets you track the number of social actions (+1 clicks, Tweets, etc) taken on your site, all in one place.
- The Social Pages report allows you to compare the pages on your site to see which are driving the highest the number of social actions.