Social Fridays: Help your site stand out with the +1 button

As Google+ has continued to evolve and grow, we’ve released a number of features and tools to help you engage with your users in new ways. We’ve heard from publishers that they’d like to ensure they’re getting set up in the right way on Google+, and so we’re kicking off a Social Friday series right here on our blog. Our goal is to help you make the most of Google+, discover ways to reach new audiences, and use our resources to make data-driven decisions.

Even if you’ve already gotten started with Google+, we encourage you to follow along over the next few weeks to make sure you’re using our social tools optimally for your website and business. Today, we’ll start off our series with a look at the +1 button, and show you how you can track its impact with Webmaster Tools.

The +1 button helps you expand your audience by enabling users to recommend your content to their friends and contacts. When a user clicks the +1 button on your site, they’ll be able to share your site’s link with their contacts via their Google+ stream. This can help you extend your reach beyond just your existing fans, to their circles of friends. Be sure to place the +1 button on your pages so that users can endorse your content -- we recommend locations like the header and footer of your pages, and also on pages that tend to be shared frequently, like articles or product pages.

In addition, +1 recommendations will be visible to a user’s friends and contacts on relevant Google.com search results, which can help your site stand out. For example, let’s say John is a fan of your content and he clicks a +1 button on your site. When John’s friend Sue is logged in to her Google Account and performs a Google.com search that includes your site in the results, she may see an annotation below your site that tells her John has +1’d it. This annotation may help your site stand out to Sue because it’s personally relevant to her. Overall, as potential visitors see recommendations from their friends and contacts among their Google search results, you could see more, and better qualified, traffic coming from Google.

So how is the +1 button performing for you so far? You can find out using Social Reports in Analytics.

Get started with the +1 button on your pages today -- just generate a short snippet of code and paste it into the HTML of your site, as you do with your AdSense ad code. You’ll also be able to customize the size and layout for your site. For help with the +1 button, visit our Google+ Webmaster FAQ.

Thanks for joining us for our first Social Fridays post. Next week, we’ll discuss Google+ pages for your business and how to get set up optimally. Do you have feedback or best practices to share with other publishers about today’s content? Feel free to leave us a comment on our AdSense +page.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Let Us Know How To Make Social More Useful For You

Google Analytics users are a digitally savvy bunch. As such we’re lucky to have a passionate community of marketers, analysts and developers that follow us across social platforms. Thousands of you read our blog posts, Tweets, and Google+ updates daily and we always use engagement data to refine what we share (and how we share it).

However, in social numbers are best paired with qualitative feedback and understanding more about who you, our most passionate users are. That’s why for the first time we’re taking feedback directly from you on how we can make our social participation even more useful.

Want more tips? More trends and opinion pieces? Video guides? Let us know and we’ll try and fulfill it. 

As a thank you for your time, we’ll be shipping 50 random respondents who complete the entire survey Google Analytics t-shirts. 

Posted by Adam Singer, Google Analytics Team


Update: this survey is now closed and we've removed the link -- thanks everyone for your feedback! We'll be using your ideas to improve how we participate in social.

Social Reports are now found under 'Traffic Sources'

We’ve recently consolidated the locations of our social reports. The 3 reports, Social Engagement, Social Actions, & Social Pages were previously listed in the Audience section and have been moved to the Traffic Sources -> Social section. Click through to see the reports in your Analytics Account.

In addition we’ve added new social reports and functionality, as detailed on our recent blog post on the launch of our Social Reports. Users now have access to both onsite behavior, the existing data, and off-site social activities of partners such as Google+, Digg, and Reddit among others. Below is a summary of how to access the data from the old reports in the new ones.

To access onsite activities use the Traffic Sources -> Social -> Social Plugins report. Here you see the social activities broken down by content. Selecting a specific page shows you the social activities by network for that page. Click the “Social Source and action” tab highlighted in the screenshot below to see a breakdown of the itemized activities.

Hope you’ll find this information helpful and learn more about how social channels are delivering value to your website.

Posted by Linus Chou, Google Analytics Team

How Google+ has helped Cadbury connect with over 1.2 million people

Cadbury has become the European brand with the largest number of followers on Google+, currently at 1.2 million. Their Google+ success is having a strong impact on their overall marketing strategy, especially by improving the performance of their Search campaigns. The question is how exactly did they do this?

Their first step was to create a Google+ page. As featured in a previous blog post, Cadbury used hangouts to interact in real time with Olympic athletes and chocolate experts, and to participate in creating the chocolate replica Google+ page. By promoting their hangouts, Cadbury grew their Google+ follower base by 150,000 people.

They also used circles to segment their followers according to their chocolate preferences and unveiled a brand-new product launch, the Dairy Milk Bubbly Bar, which has achieved a strong impact, already sales are over £8M.

However, where they are seeing tremendous results is in their search campaigns. Since they started using social extensions, which links Cadbury’s Google+ page to its AdWords campaigns, they have achieved a 17% uplift in CTR across all their AdWords campaigns. Now when you search for “Cadbury” and see the relevant ad, recommendations from your friends are displayed directly with it, making the ad much more relevant to you. By clicking on the social extension, you directly land on Cadbury’s Google+ page and can start following all the great content they are posting.

And since Cadbury installed the Google+ badge on its homepage, it’s now easier than ever for fans to follow the brand; Cadbury gains 10,000 new followers on average per day and have had an increase of 7.5% of traffic from Google URLs. To continue benefiting from their Google+ success, Cadbury are looking to include a Google+ social stream that will pull in their most recent updates into a re-launch of their homepage, which will be happening soon. Stay tuned to learn how Cadbury continue to innovate to make their Google+ experience a success!

Learn more about Cadbury’s success with Google+ by reading the full case study here.

Posted by Natalia Cano, Product Marketing Manager Google+ For Businesses

Join Google Analytics on Google+

Google Analytics users are part of a passionate community. Many of you go beyond using the product and actively seek a connection with Google team members and other GA users to stay at the edge of what’s next. For example, more than 80,000 readers subscribe to the Google Analytics blog through our RSS feed, our videos on YouTube have been viewed more than 3.5 million times and well over 100,000 people follow us on Twitter. 

So it isn’t surprising we’ve received requests from many of you to participate on Google+. We’re excited to fulfill that expectation with a brand new Google+ page for Google Analytics. 

Join us on Google+ today

Check out our Google+ page and add us to your analytics, marketing or related circle. We’ll be sharing the latest and greatest about Google Analytics and digital marketing overall to help you become a better practitioner and achieve more with your efforts. 

Expect everything from how-to’s/tips, technical advice, interesting stats, plus some fun mixed in for good measure. In addition to useful updates, we’re planning to give you the opportunity to hang out live with some of the team members behind Google Analytics. If there’s anything else you’d like to see, please add a comment to this thread on Google+ and we’ll be happy to consider it. 

Posted by Adam Singer, Google Analytics Team

Using Google Analytics Social Reports To Measure Your Website Content And Engagement in Google+

The following is a guest post contributed by Daniel Waisberg, Owner of Conversion Journey, a Google Analytics Certified Partner, and Founder of Online Behavior, a Marketing Measurement and Optimization portal.


Google Analytics has recently launched a new set of reports called Social reports, which can be used to analyze on-site and off-site interactions with social networks in reference to your own website content. The reports’ ultimate goal is to enable brands to measure the return on investment for social media activities and make more accurate, data-driven decisions about social. 

The most significant change that it brings to the game is we are now able to better tie social activities (on and off-site) to online behavior and revenue. This is especially accentuated for the Social Data Hub Partners, a group of networks that use the platform provided by Google Analytics; for all these networks we can learn deep information about off-site behavior. 

I have recently written a guide to Google+ Analytics, where I discussed how to use Google Analytics in order to understand Google+ on-site interactions (e.g. +1 button clicks) and off-site interactions (e.g. comments, posts, shares that happened on Google+). In this post I will recap the main points of that guide and add actionable tips that will help marketers and analysts use these reports effectively.

Setting Up Goals - First Step to Social Media Measurement

Before using the Social reports, it is essential to configure your website goals on Google Analytics, otherwise the reports won't be as useful (here is a step-by-step guide). Thomas Carlyle wrote: "A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder." The same is true for Google Analytics accounts: if a goal is not configured, the stats will not help improving the performance of websites, no matter how good the reports are.

Google+ Social Referral Traffic - Quantity and Quality

According to Google Analytics, the Social Sources report, the first in the list of Social reports, is described as follows:

The Sources report shows engagement metrics (Pageviews, Avg. Time on Site, Pages/Visit) for traffic from each social network. This report is also enhanced with off-site data for Social Data Hub partner networks. Click on a partner network to see the URLs that were shared on that site, how they were shared (for example, via a "+1" or "reshare" action), and the public conversations that took place about your content.

In this report we will see the number of visitors that came through Google+, the number of pageviews that they saw, time on site and number of pages per visit. Nothing surprising.  However, since Google+ is part of the Social Data Hub, we can click through to get more detailed data on what kinds of interactions happened off-site, i.e. on plus.google.com. 

As you will see, when clicking through to the Google+ row (see screenshot above) we will have two reports on the Social Referral tab: Google+ Shared URL and Google+ Social Network and Action (the tabs can be found above the graph, and the reports below the graph).

Google+ Shared URL

The Google+ Shared URL report shows which URLs were shared in Google+ and what traffic they drove. It will also provide a Data Hub Activities metric, which tells how many interactions they drove on Google+ including: +1, post, comment and reshare.  

Actionable Tip: use this report to find out which content drives the most social activity on Google+. Based on that, you might consider increasing the exposure of this content on prominent website real estate.

Google+ Social Network and Action

If you click on the link to Social Network and Action (see arrow above), you will be able to see all interactions performed on Google+, segmented by action type. 

Google+ Conversations - Activity Stream

Moving over to real interactions with real people, Activity Streams allow us to see the conversations as they happened inside Google+ (for activities that have occurred publicly). The conversations are organized starting from the newest and we can do the following actions for each conversation:

1. Page Analytics: leads to more information regarding traffic that was resulted from the post.
2. View Ripple: leads to the post Ripple, an interactive visualization of the public shares of the post
3. View Page: leads to the website page that was shared
4. View Activity: leads to the actual publicly-shared post on Google+ 

Actionable Tip: use this report to discover people that are evangelizing your brand on Google+ and interact with them. Once you find those people, create a circle with them (call it "Evangelists") and start interacting with them in an ongoing basis.

Google+ Conversion Rates - Assisted vs. Last Interaction Analysis

This report uses the same functionality as the Multi-Channel Funnels reports. It provides both the last touch interaction value (i.e. conversions that happened in a visit attributed to Google+) and also the assisted value (i.e. conversions that happened in a visit following the visit from Google+). Above is a screenshot of how it looks and the explanation given by Google about the metrics in the chart. 

Assisted Conversions and Assisted Conversion Value: This is the number (and monetary value) of sales and conversions the social network assisted. An assist occurs when someone visits your site, leaves without converting, but returns later to convert during a subsequent visit. The higher these numbers, the more important the assist role of the social network. 

Last Interaction Conversions and Last Interaction Conversion Value: This is the number (and monetary value) of last click sales and conversions. When someone visits your site and converts, the visit is considered a last click. The higher these numbers, the more important the social network’s role in driving completion of sales and conversions. 

Assisted/Last Interaction Conversions: This ratio summarizes the social network’s overall role. A value close to 0 indicates that the social network functioned primarily in a last click capacity. A value close to 1 indicates that the social network functioned equally in an assist and a last click capacity. The more this value exceeds 1, the more the social network functioned in an assist capacity.

Actionable Tip: use this report to understand where in the buying cycle is your Social Media traffic. This may help you understand which kind of offers will be most effective on Social Networks.

Google+ Social Plugin - On-site Interactions

The Social Plugins report provides an account of the social actions that happened inside the website and in which pages they occur. +1 buttons spread in the website content will be available in this report automagically (for other social buttons, coding is required). 

Actionable Tip: use this report to understand which content is being +1'ed in-site. This will help you optimize the position of +1 buttons to increase exposure through Google+.

Google+ Visitors Flow

This report uses the same functionality used in the flow visualization report released by Google in 2011. Basically, it provides the path through which visitors experienced the website. In this report we will be able to segment just by visits originating from Google+. You can find the report at http://onbe.co/GXYQMN  

Actionable Tip: use this report to understand how well optimized your site is for social traffic. If you find a page that is receiving large amounts of social traffic and is not persuading visitors to click-through (i.e. high drop rate), you might consider testing that page.

Concluding Thoughts

As seen above, Google Analytics has created robust tracking and analysis abilities for Google+, which puts Google+ in an excellent position when it comes to other Social Networks. In general, many other social sites don’t provide detailed metrics into what happens inside their walls, which makes investments less measurable. If marketers can easily measure how well each social networks perform, more resources might be devoted to them.

Posted by Daniel Waisberg, Conversion Journey

Capturing The Value Of Social Media Using Google Analytics

Measuring the value of social media has been a challenge for marketers. And with good reason: it’s hard to understand exactly what is happening in an environment where activity occurs both on and off your website. Since social media is often an upper funnel player in a shopper’s journey, it's not always easy to determine which social channels actually drive value for your business and which tactics are most effective.

But as the social industry matures, marketers and web analysts need true outcome-oriented reports. After all, although social is growing in popularity, brand websites - not social networks - remain the place where people most often purchase or convert. 

That’s why we’re releasing a new set of Social reports within Google Analytics. The new reports bridge the gap between social media and the business metrics you care about - allowing you to better measure the full value of the social channel for your business. We wanted to help you with 3 things:

• Identify the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions 
• Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs

The Social reports allow you to analyze all of this information together and see a more complete picture of social impact than often used today. Here are a couple of the things you can do with our new reports:

Overview Report: see social performance at a glance and its impact on conversions

The Overview report allows you to see at a glance how much conversion value is generated from your social channels. The Social Value visualization compares the number and monetary value of all your goal completions against those that resulted from social referrals - both as last interaction, and assisted.

A visit from a social referral may result in conversion immediately or it may assist in a conversion that occurs later on. Referrals that lead to conversions immediately are labeled as Last Interaction Social Conversion. If a referral from a social source doesn’t immediately generate a conversion, but the visitor returns later and converts, the referral is included as an Assisted Social Conversion. 

Conversions Report: which goals are being impacted by social media

With the Conversions report, marketers can now measure the value of each individual social channel by seeing the conversion rates of each social network and the monetary value they drive to your business.

For example, you can see the effect that social content (i.e. a new video you created) had on conversions. Look at the time graph to see whether Goal Completions via Social Referral peaked after the content was published. Remember that you need to define goals and goal values in order to see data in this report, so tailor it to the things that matter to your business. Networks with a higher assisted / last interaction conversions ratio provide greater assisted conversions.

Social Sources - find out how visitors from different sources behave

The Social Sources report shows engagement and conversion metrics for each social network so you can see how people are interacting with your content and whether it’s leading to a desired outcome.

For example, if you run social campaigns that promote specific products, you can see via the Social Visitor Flow whether visitors from each social network entered your site through these product pages and whether they continued on to other parts of the site or whether they exited.  

Social Plugins: find the content that’s good enough to share

If you publish content, you'll want to know which articles are most commonly shared or recommended, and on which social networks they're being shared. The Social Plugin report shows which articles on your site are receiving the most engagement and which social buttons - for example, Google +1 - are being clicked to share them. 

You can use this information to create more of the type of content that's popular with your visitors, and test different layouts of social sharing buttons to improve use by your community. 

Activity Stream: what’s happening outside of your website

While the other reports show you the impact that social engagement is having on your site, the Activities Stream tab (located within the sources report) shows how people are engaging socially with your content off your site across the social web. 

For content that was shared publicly, you can see the URLs they shared, how and where they shared (via a “reshare” on Google+ for example), and what they said. Currently, activities are reported for Google+ and across a growing list of our Social Data Hub partners including recently signed brands Badoo, Disqus, Echo, Hatena and Meetup.

These new social reports will be available for all users over the next few weeks under the Standard Reporting Tab - please take a look and tell us what you think.

Posted by Phil Mui, Group Product Manager

An invitation to social sites to integrate with Google Analytics

Every day, millions of people share and engage with content online. But most sharing doesn’t happen on the site where it was published, it happens throughout the social web. Marketers and publishers are looking for a comprehensive view of all interactions with their content - on and off their site - and so we’re working hard to make this happen.

To enable our customers to discover who’s sharing, voting and bookmarking their content on the social web, cross-network measurement needs to become easier. So today we’re inviting social networks and platforms to integrate their activity streams with Google Analytics. Through these integrations, marketers and publishers will be able to discover off-site engagement, optimize their engagement within each social community, and measure the impact of each social channel and its associated digital investment.

Any network can integrate their streams - like +1, votes, and comments - into the Google Analytics social reports, which will be fully available next year to the many marketers, publishers, and websites that are using Google Analytics for free.

To make integration easy for social networks and platforms we’ve created a social data hub - it’s based on widely deployed, open web standards such as ActivityStreams and PubsubHubbub. A number of partners are already working with us to improve measurement of social actions - including Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Gigya, LiveFyre, ReadItLater, Reddit, TypePad, Vkontakte, and of course, Google+, Blogger and Google Groups.




We’ll have more to share next year, so keep reading the blog or follow us on twitter @googleanalytics for updates. If you’re a social network or platform interested to learn about integrating with Google Analytics you can visit our developer site where you’ll find more information.

Phil Mui, Group Product Manager & Ilya Grigorik, Engineering Manager, Google Analytics

Optimize Engagement using AddThis and ShareThis with Analytics

Increasingly users are discovering great content, products and links through social referrals such as +1 button endorsements, comments, likes, and shares. Earlier this year we introduced Social Plugin Analytics to help you analyze how users engage with any social plugin installed on your site - after all, what can be measured can also be improved and optimized!

MilkADeal started using Google Analytics earlier this year. It is a company in Malaysia that has benefited greatly from using Social Plugin Analytics. By using these new reports, they are able to uncover insights and create significant business process improvements. As reported in the New Straits Times, "In particular, the newly introduced social interaction tracking tool...We've been using it only in the last couple of weeks but we have seen an increase of almost 60% in social interaction visitors to our site," said Wilson Quah, founder of MilkADeal."

By optimizing the instrumentation of a few buttons on their site, MilkADeal is able to achieve better engagement, a big boost in number of high quality referrals, and better outcomes! Today, we are happy to announce that our partners, AddThis and ShareThis, are making this social plugin analysis even easier. Just as the +1 button is automatically instrumented for you by the Google+ team, publishers using AddThis and ShareThis will now have first class integrations with Social Plugin Analytics!

“Providing real-time analytics to 10 million domains each month, we see what big data can do every day. Integrating AddThis social signals into Google Analytics is a big win for publishers. We’re excited to contribute social sharing insight where it can be viewed in context of the GA interface.”

Will Meyer, VP of Publisher Products, Clearspring

“At ShareThis, we work to provide our publisher network of one million+ websites with actionable analytics on their social activity. It's great to see Google paving the way for the entire industry to derive meaningful insights from the social Web and we're incredibly pleased to be a launch partner."

Kurt Abrahamson, CEO, ShareThis

To enable the integration for all of your AddThis buttons, you are now just one line of code away, and ShareThis users don’t have to do a thing. If you have Google Analytics installed, and you are using a ShareThis widget, simply login into Google Analytics and check out your new social reports!

Posted by Ilya Grigorik, Google Analytics team

Update: AddToAny users will also be happy to know that their social buttons are automatically instrumented to work with event tracking and social plugin analytics!

Measuring and optimising Fairmont's social media efforts with Google Analytics

Social media is a great way for marketers to spread awareness about their products, stay in touch with and interact with their loyal customers. Barbara Pezzi, Director of Web Analytics and Search Optimization, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International, is back to share with us how Fairmont measure and analyse their social media efforts with Google Analytics. By using a combination of campaign tracking parameters and advanced segments (which can be used in combinations with social plugin analytics), Barbara is able to assess which social media campaigns work the best for generating bookings.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Senior Conversion Specialist, Google Southeast Asia