Fairmont Gets Deeper Understanding of Social Interactions for Real Results

How do you improve social messaging for some of the world's most prestigious hotels? If you're Fairmont Raffles Hotels, you turn to Google Analytics. 

Fairmont is famous for its nearly 100 global luxury hotels, from the original Raffles Hotel in Singapore to the grand Empress Fairmont in Victoria, B.C.  The variety of the properties can make social impact tricky to measure, says Barbara Pezzi, Director of Analytics & SEO.

Charmingly direct, Pezzi says her team tried other social media analytics tools and found that "the metrics were really lame. Number of likes and retweets — that didn't really tell us anything." They wanted to know exactly who they were attracting and how.

Once the Fairmont team began using Google Analytics, they were able to see their audiences more clearly and tailor messages to fit. The results were impressive: a doubling of bookings and revenue from social media. 

Here's the whole story:

"It was a big revelation for everyone" — when it comes to analytics, those are the magic words.

Learn more about Google Analytics and Google Analytics Premium here.

Posted by Suzanne Mumford, Google Analytics Marketing

Mind the Gap: Improving Referral Information with Universal Analytics

The following is a guest post contributed by Dan Wilkerson, marketing manager at LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics Certified Partner & Digital Marketing Consultancy.

A core issue with measuring social media is that due to the way that traffic migrates around the web, there are lots of situations where we lose referrer information and those visits end up being labeled as 'Direct' inside of our analytics.

This can happen for a variety of reasons, but the most common situations where this kind of erroneous attribution occurs are:

• When a user clicks an untagged link inside an email
• When a user visits from a mobile application
• When a user clicks a link shared to them via an instant message

If a visitor has come to your site previously, Google Analytics will simply apply the same referral information it had for their previous visit, which it retrieves from the UTMZ cookie it previously saved on the visitor's browser. But, if there are no cookies, Analytics has no information, and buckets the visitor into Direct.

Obviously, this is problematic; 'Direct' is supposed to represent visitors who bookmark or directly type in our URL. These users are accessing our site through a shared link, and should be counted as referrals. Thankfully, we have some tools at our disposal to combat some of these scenarios, most notably campaign parameters. But campaign parameters only help with links that you share; what about when a visitor comes to your site and shares the link themselves?

These visits can cause serious problems when it comes time to analyze your data. For example, we offer Google Analytics & AdWords training. Most of our attendees are sponsored by their employers. This means they visit our site, scope out our training, and then email a link to a procurement officer, who clicks through and makes the purchase. Since the procurement officer comes through on the emailed link and has never visited our site, the conversion gets bucketed into 'Direct / None' and we lose all of the visit data for the employee who was interested in the first place. This can compound into a sort of feedback loop - the only data we see would be for individuals who buy their own tickets, meaning we might optimize our marketing for smaller businesses that send us less attendees. In other words, we'd be interpreting data from the wrong customers. Imagine how this kind of feedback loop might impact a B2B trying to generate enterprise-level leads - since they'd only see information on the small fry, they could wind up driving more of the wrong kind of lead to their sales team, and less of the right kind.

For a long time, this has been sort of the status quo. Now, with new features available in Universal Analytics, we have some tools we can employ to combat this problem. In this post, I want to share with you a solution that I've developed to reduce the amount of Direct traffic. We're calling it DirectMonster, and we're really excited to make it open source and available to the Google Analytics community.

What is DirectMonster?

DirectMonster is a JavaScript plug-in for Google Analytics that appends a visitor's referral information as ciphered campaign parameters as an anchor of the current URL. The result looks something like this:

When the visitor copies and shares the URL from the toolbar, they copy that stored referral information along with it. When someone without referral information lands on the site through a link with those encoded parameters, the script decodes that information as campaign parameters to pass along to Google Analytics, waits until Analytics writes a fresh UTMZ cookie, and then ciphers, encodes, and re-appends the visitors current referral information. It also appends '-slb' to the utm_content parameter. That way, those visits can be segmented from 'canonical' referrals for later analysis, if necessary. The visitor who would have had no referral information now is credited as being referred from the same source as the visitor who shared the link with them. This means that visits that normally would have been erroneously segmented as 'Direct / None' will now more accurately reflect the channel that deserves credit for the visit. 

At first, this might seem wrong - shouldn't we just let Analytics do its job and not interfere? But, the fact is that those visits aren't really Direct, at least not in its truest interpretation, and having 'assisted referrer' channel information gives you actionable insight. Plus, by weeding out those non-Direct scenarios, your Direct / None numbers will start to more accurately represent visitors who come to your site directly, which can be very important for other measurement and attribution. It's actually better all the way around. After all, if a Facebook share is what ultimately drove that visitor to your site, isn't having that information more valuable than having nothing at all? This way, you'll have last-click attribution for conversions that otherwise would have simply been bucketed as Direct. Of course, you won't have the visit history of the assisting referrer, but... well, more on that soon.

We've been fine-tuning this on our site for the past few months, and we've been able to greatly enhance our conversion attribution accuracy. In our video case study, I mentioned that we enhanced attribution by 47.5%; since that time, we've seen the accuracy of our data continue to climb; whereas before, we were seeing 'Direct / None' account for 45.5% of our conversions, it now accounts for just 20.6% - a decrease of 54.7%. Better yet, look at what it's done to all of our traffic:

We've gone from having about 20-25% of our traffic come in 'Direct / None' to just under 15%, and I anticipate that number will continue to fall.

DirectMonster and Universal Analytics

One of the coolest features that Universal Analytics has given us is Custom Dimensions. If you're not familiar with them, take a minute and read the Google Developer Resources page about what they are and how they work. Although initially designed for the asynchronous code, Universal Analytics has allowed us to put DirectMonster on steriods. 

In our Universal implementation, we store the visitors CID as a visit-level custom dimension, and we add their CID to the hashed parameters we're already storing in the anchor of their URL. 

When a visitor comes through on a link with a CID that differs from their own, we capture the stored CID as the Assisted Referrer. Then, we can open up our Custom Reports later on and view what visitors were referred to our site by whom, and what they did when they got there.

What does this mean? If a celebrity tweets a link to your product, you can discover exactly how many visitors they referred, and how much revenue those visitors generated. 

By cross-referencing the Assisted CID for single-visit 'Direct / None' purchases, you can discover the true visit history of a conversion.

Since it takes advantage of advanced Universal Analytics functionality, DirectMonster 2.0 requires some advanced implementation as well. Unlike its cousin, you'll need to adjust your Analytics tracking code to include a few functions, and you'll need to configure the Custom Dimensions you'll be storing a visitors CID and assisted referrers CID inside of. For a full reference on how to get either version of DirectMonster and configure it for your site, check out our blog post covering the topic in detail here or visit our GitHub page and get DirectMonster for yourself. 

I hope that you're as excited as I am about this development and all of the things Universal Analytics is enabling us to do. Think of a use case I didn't mention? Share it with me in the comments!

Posted by Dan Wilkerson, marketing manager at LunaMetrics

Measure What Matters—A Better Approach to Social Attribution

Webinar on Tuesday 7/16
Register for the webinar here.

When it comes to web analytics, one of the biggest complaints from marketers has long been the lack of technology to measure the ROI of social media. Thanks to our exciting integration between Google Analytics and Wildfire by Google that was first announced at thinkDoubleClick in June, those blind spots are now a thing of the past. This webinar will demonstrate how social media impacts the customer journey and then show you how Google Analytics lets you measure that influence in detail.

We’ll start by showing you the best way to set up your modeling and reporting to include all your social marketing efforts. Then we’ll give you a live demo of the Google Analytics integration with Wildfire. Now you’ll be able to see exactly how each and every social message and page published with Wildfire drives traffic and revenue to your website.

The webinar features Adam Singer, Product Marketing Manager for Google Analytics and Jessica Gilmartin, the Head of Product Marketing for Wildfire by Google. They’ll be joined by Adam Kuznia, Social Media Manager for Maryland Live! Casino, who will share the story of how he built the gaming industry’s largest East Coast social media community from scratch in just six months using Wildfire and Google Analytics, and proved to his management team the ROI of social.

This webinar is Part 1 of a three-part educational series introducing Google and Wildfire analytics integrations, so be sure not to miss it.

Date: Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Time: 10am PDT / 1pm EDT/ 5pm GMT

Duration: 1 hr

Level: 101 / Beginner

Register here.

Posted by the Wildfire Team

Improving The Activity Stream In Social Reports

We’ve redesigned the Google Analytics Social Reports to make it easier to see the conversations and activity happening surrounding your content on our Social Data Hub Partners. We’re introducing 2 new reports that make it easier to consume this data:

• Data Hub Activity
• Trackbacks

The activity stream was previously available via drill down from the Network Referrals or Landing Pages reports. We have now made it a standalone report. By navigating to the Data Hub Activity report you’ll see a timeline of the number of activities that have occurred in the Social Data Hub and the raw activities in a list below. You can also filter this list by any specific networks you choose. 

We’re also excited to announce that Trackbacks are now available in a standalone report. Trackbacks are all of your inbound links across the web, so you’ll be informed if anyone from a small to blog to the New York Times posts a link to your site. Additionally, we are providing context for the significance of each of these trackbacks by displaying the number of visits that were driven by each endorsing URL during the reporting period. You’ll see this number presented alongside the trackback. 

Image via Google’s Analytics Advocate, Justin Cutroni 

Give them a try and happy analyzing!

Posted by Linus Chou, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Social that Adds Up

Earlier this week HootSuite Enterprise hosted Adam Singer, from Google Analytics, to share how you can use Google to measure social performance. With over half of people talking more online than they do in “real life”, digital social media is a critical platform for marketers, but how do we measure its impact?

Most marketers use platform metrics as performance indicators, but often they cannot be linked to sales. Engagement is the easiest and often the most measured social metric in terms of followers, fans and comments. However, revenue is often the more important (and more difficult to measure) metric that can help marketers determine an ROI for their social media efforts. Google offers two solutions that can help drive social media performance: Google+ and Google Analytics social reports. 

Building relationships on Google+ may improve other parts of your marketing plan. Google+ is integrating social in all the Google products marketers already use, which can help them drive deeper engagement with their target customers, be more relevant by offering social recommendations when customers need them most and remain accountable by providing transparency of how their ad dollars are performing. 

With Google Analytics Social reports you can tie your social media to metrics you care about. Here are some top tips Adam covered in the webinar:

• Find something you can measure (micro or macro-conversions) and sprint in that direction. Focus on how separate channels can drive different types of site actions, which can be tied to a value you determine.
• Measure success criteria directionally. Benchmarks are uncommon and do not necessarily translate across products, services or industries.
• Create your social posts with a measurement goal in mind. Be sure to include a call to action to inspire your audience to act.
• Understand and connect with your audience differently across the different networks. Try not to post the same thing on each platform, customize and use what works best.

Thank you to those who could join, if you have any questions feel free to reach out to Adam (+AdamSinger on Google+) or watch the webinar recording here.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

Stat Source: Socialnomics, 2009

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

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

Social Plugin Analytics in Google Analytics

With our recent Social Plugin Analytics launch you now have the ability to analyse how users engage with any social plugin such as Google’s +1 button and Twitter’s Tweet button. Now it’s time for the lowdown on how to set this feature up to work for you. If you are a developer, you should pay particularly close attention.

If you’ve added +1 buttons to your site and your Analytics implementation is up to date, integration is automatic and you should already see data in your account. You can ensure the +1 integration is working by taking some simple steps.

If you want to integrate with other social plugins, like Twitter, we’ve also made it really easy. The latest version of the tracking code has a new _trackSocial method to capture various aspects of a social plugin interaction. Using the async javascript snippet, the easiest way to call this method is to use:

_gaq.push([‘_trackSocial’, socialNetwork, socialAction]);

And if you’re using the traditional snippet you’ll need to use this syntax:

var pageTracker = _gat._createTracker(‘UA-xxxxx-y’);
pageTracker._trackSocial(socialNetwork, socialAction);

You then want to call this method somewhere where you know the social plugin has been clicked on. We’ve included some example on how this work with Twitter’s plugin API as well as Facebook’s plugin API and you can see a working demo here. Sweet!

If you are building an integration for use by several Analytics users we encourage you to use the code for the async snippet for now. Also, to enable the development of integrations such as these we would like to share with our customers that we are working toward better compatibility between the sync and async tags with the goal of enabling calls such as _trackSocial to work for both version with the same syntax.

Finally, if you are a developer of a content management plugin which adds social plugins to websites, or if you build social plugins, we want to work with you! Ideally we’d love for all users of your plugin and Google Analytics to have seamless social analytics. In the developer community spirit we’re giving out free t-shirts to the first 100 developers who integrate a social plugin, or a Content Management plugin that adds social widgets to sites with Google Analytics. Let us know what you’ve done by submitting your plugin here.

UPDATE: 7/8/11 5:30pm PST, corrected references to the social plugin analytics feature.

Posted by John Jersin, Google Analytics Team

+1 reporting in Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics

Cross-posted from the AdSense and Google Webmaster blogs.

It’s been a busy week for us here at the Googleplex. First we released +1 buttons to Google search sites globally, then we announced the beginning of the Google+ project.

The +1 button and the Google+ project are both about making it easier to connect with the people you trust online. For the +1 button, that means bringing advice from trusted friends and contacts right into Google search, letting the users who love your web content recommend it at the moment of decision.

But when you’re managing a website, it's usually not real until you can measure it. So we’re happy to say we’ve got one more announcement to make -- today we’re releasing reports that show you the value +1 buttons bring to your site.

First, +1 metrics in Google Webmaster Tools can show you how the +1 button affects the traffic coming to your pages:

• 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.

Use the +1 Metrics menu on the side of the page to view your reports. If you haven’t yet verified your site on Google Webmaster Tools, you can follow these instructions to get access.

Finally, you can also see how users share your content using other buttons besides +1 by using Social Plugin Analytics in Google Analytics. Once you configure the JavaScript for Analytics, the Social Engagement reports help you compare the various types of sharing actions that occur on your pages.

• 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 analyse 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.

Over the next few days (and if you’re using the default version of the latest Google Analytics tracking code), if you’ve added +1 buttons to your site we’ll automatically enable Social Plugin Analytics for +1 in your account. You can enable analytics for other social plugins in just a few simple steps.

Social reporting is just getting started. As people continue to find new ways to interact across the web, we look forward to new reports that help business owners understand the value that social actions are providing to their business. So +1 to data!

UPDATE: 7/8/11 5:30pm PST, corrected references to the social plugin analytics feature.

Posted by Dan Rodney, Software Engineer