The response regarding Google+ has been mixed. While many individual users and brands who have accounts are fans of the forum, a large part of the online community either hasn’t made the jump or hasn’t used their account since the initial release. If you’re trying to determine whether the Google+ arena is the best social option for your brand, do yourself a favor and determine your Google+ presence with Google+ Analytics. Google wrote about it in a recent blog post, including some tips to help you gain more engagement and interaction. But if you’re still new to the world of Google+, here are the basics you need to know when analyzing stats.
To determine your engagement and traffic from Google+, go to your Google Analytics account. Go to your Social Sources report and go to the Google+ row. Here you’ll be able to determine stats like the average visit duration, pageviews, etc. But by clicking through the row, you’ll be able to find more essential information.
The Google+ Shared URL report tells you what urls were shared via Google+ as well as pageviews, visit duration, etc. When clicked, the Social Network and Action tab will give you a report regarding Google+ related actions and interactions. This will give you an idea of how many people are viewing your posts, sharing them and using Google+ to interact with your brand.
You can also examine your interactions or conversations with real people on Google+. The Activity Stream report will list all of these for you, while giving you the option to view stats like page analytics.
If you’re a brand focused on making paying customers of your social followers, then Conversions report is extremely important to examine. Assisted Conversions allow you to see users who visited your site without buying, but returned later and purchased something, and Last Interaction Conversions gives you the number of users who followed through on conversion during the initial site visit.
By examining these numbers and measuring how much your activity on Google+ impacts your traffic, revenue, etc., you’ll be able to determine how important it is for your brand.
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