Tracking Social: Do you know your +1 Impact

Google Plus & then the +1 both were launched in quick succession and nobody knew how to track the impact +1 will have on your organic traffic. +1 does affect organic results and you will know it when you see your analyze your data in GA or Google Webmasters. Google has launched it with the intention of merging Social & Organic to give socially accurate organic listings. With that carrot people went on a frenzy and started adding +1 to their website, blogs, White Papers, pictures, case studies, Press Releases & so on. So what now, when polled in a Marketing forum people responded with a positive for being Social however responded they were clueless in how to track Social. I will take up Social Analytics in detail later in a blog in this blog i plan to focus on whats easy and readily available and you are not using it probably.


If you are wondering what a +1 button is upgrade yourself.

Tracking Social
+1 Impact: This is the easier one so let me start here. To track this you need to have Google Webmasters activated on your Website. If you already have a GA account this can be done quickly, If you don't have a GA a/c just put a line-of-code from your Webmasters to enable this for you. There are other benefits of having Google Webmasters which i will be covering in detail later. I am only going to focus on tracking Social Impact & Social Interactions.

Once Webmasters is activated & your Website has been crawled by the Webmaster bots you will see data flowing in.

There are 3 reports which will give you all the details you need on your +1 impact.

• 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. Google Webmaster will 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, it will only show audience information when a significant number of users have +1’d pages from your site.

Moving on to track the more important Share on Facebook, Twitter & other social buttons

Setting up Social Analytics in GA:
To set up tracking for social interactions, you'll need to use the _trackSocial method in GA, which sends social interaction data to Google Analytics. The method should be called once a user has completed a social interaction. Each social network uses a different mechanism to determine when the social interaction occurs and this typically requires integrating with the API for that network button.

Here is a description of the _trackSocial method:
_gaq.push(['_trackSocial', network, socialAction, opt_target, opt_pagePath]);

Where the parameters represent:

• network

Required. A string representing the social network being tracked (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)

• socialAction

Required. A string representing the social action being tracked (e.g. Like, Share, Tweet)

• opt_target

Optional. A string representing the URL (or resource) which receives the action. For example, if a user clicks the Like button on a page on a site, the the opt_target might be set to the title of the page, or an ID used to identify the page in a content management system. In many cases, the page you Like is the same page you are on. So if this parameter is undefined, or omitted, the tracking code defaults to using document.location.href.

• opt_pagePath
  A string representing the page by path (including parameters) from which the action occurred. For example, if you click a Like button on http://www.a.com/a/b/c/index.html, then opt_pagePath should be set to /a/b/c/index.html. Almost always, the path of the page is the source of the social action. So if this parameter is undefined or omitted, the tracking code defaults to using location.pathnamepageviews by modifying the optional page path parameter with the Google Analytics _trackPageview method.

Optional. A string representing the page by path (including parameters) from which the action occurred. For example, if you click a Like button on

To see a working example of how to integrate Analytics with Facebook and Twitter buttons check out the Social Analytics sample code.

Hope this blog helps you in tracking Social widgets on your website, if you have fresh ideas or implemented similar tracking or you want to share your best practices you can share them here.