How to measure Google Plus with analytics
This post was updated for new information on July 8, 2011
Right now, Google Plus (hereafter lazily abbreviated as G+) is in its infancy. That said, it’s certainly got the buzz and the shine that social media folks have been craving for some time. It’s got the ease of Facebook plus the asymmetric relationship nature of Twitter. As a result, expect marketers to flock there in droves as they get invited. Shortly after their arrival and spamming of their friends, the inevitable question will be asked:
How do you measure this thing?
For those who are practitioners of sensible marketing methods, the answer is: pretty much the same way you measure every other social network. I will assume that you have the prerequisites done of having Goals and Goal Values for your website set up in your analytics package of choice before we go any further.
Let’s look at G+ through the lens of a standard marketing funnel.
Caveat: G+ is iterating very, very rapidly. By the time you read this post, there’s a good chance that there will be updates or differences. Caveat lector.
1. Traffic.
G+ sends out its outbound clicks from a specific URL, plus.google.com. If you use Google Analytics, you’ll find it under Traffic Sources > Referring Sites > plus.google.com.
Kick it up a notch by now creating an advanced traffic segment called Google+, using that referring URL as the source:
Now you can go to any tab, any report in Google Analytics and see Google+ traffic side by side with your regular traffic, just by selecting the Google+ traffic segment:
2. Click conversion.
Bit.ly, Goo.gl, Argyle Social, etc. are your friends. Avoid posting links in the clear if you can; use your preferred link shortener to ensure you get at least raw click data.
Tip: If you don’t use Google’s shortener (Goo.gl) elsewhere, use it only in G+, then you’ll have an additional way to see how far things are being shared outside of G+. For example, if you post something to G+ and you see the Goo.gl link you shared being tweeted, you know that influence from G+ is leaking over into Twitter.
3. Action conversion.
If you’re clever and smart, you’re using Google’s Analytics campaign builder tool to create trackable links. Now it’s just a matter of adding G+ as a campaign source. Obviously if you don’t use GA, use whatever similar method works with your analytics package.
Once you do this, you’ll be able to see things at the campaign level, which means a lot more granularity when it comes to tracking what happens with your G+ traffic. For example, you’ll be able to effectively measure goals and goal conversion.
Tip: the + is a valid URL character, so avoid using it when you’re creating trackable links. Write out the word plus instead to ensure things don’t get muddied or broken in your reporting downstream.
Want to get really sneaky and see how well different parts of G+ are working for you? Change your campaign source from just one source (like googleplus) to a standard syntax that indicates what circle you’re sharing things with. For example:
Now you’ll have analytics data for googleplus-friends, googleplus-influencers, googleplus-twitterfriends, whatever distinctions you want to set up. At the cost of additional time to set up links, you’ll gain much more granularity and understanding of how G+ works for you. You might even do this with just one or two circles to see how quickly they share something.
4. Financial benefit.
You won’t have this data for a little while (at least not if you care about statistically valid data), but once a month or so has passed, you’ll want to measure how many business objectives came from G+ and then develop a basic, baseline ROI measurement from them, as well as an earnings per lead (EPL) calculation.
Fundamentally:
ROI = Earned – Spent / Spent
Remember that time is money! Spent is never zero unless you don’t use G+.
EPL = Earned – Spent / Leads
The EPL calculation is powerful for doing apples to apples comparisons of different channels for the purposes of lead generation. It answers the question of what your efforts on Facebook are worth, what your efforts on Twitter are worth, and of course, what your efforts on G+ are worth.
Here’s the catch: with any new site or service, you cannot rely on case studies or industry standards because there aren’t any. It’s brand new. As a result, in order to develop a baseline metric for the new channel, you need to go out and use it. Try it out. See if you can get people interested in your stuff (it helps to have interesting stuff), see how they behave relative to other channels, and at the end of the trial period, you should have an apples to apples comparison of how any given channel is working for you.
Measuring G+ is no different than any other social network except that a lot of the conveniences we’ve become accustomed to (Tweetdeck integration, built in URL shortening services, etc.) aren’t there yet. They will be soon. For now, be sure to use these methods and tools if you want to get an early idea of how the service is working for you, and get started measuring!
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Celebrating America: Amendments to the Constitution
In celebration of America’s independence, I thought I’d publish 3 posts about the most important document that most Americans haven’t laid eyes on in years, if not decades: the Constitution of the United States of America. Despite being freely and widely available, not many people have read it recently, if at all, yet it sets down the rules about what you and the government can and cannot do. It’s worth your time to read it. The full text of the Amendments to the Constitution (11-27) is after the break (to avoid swamping RSS readers with a wall of text).
Celebrating America: The Bill of Rights
In celebration of America’s independence, I thought I’d publish 3 posts about the most important document that most Americans haven’t laid eyes on in years, if not decades: the Constitution of the United States of America. Despite being freely and widely available, not many people have read it recently, if at all, yet it sets down the rules about what you and the government can and cannot do. It’s worth your time to read it. The full text of the Bill of Rights, Amendments 1-10 of the Constitution, is after the break (to avoid swamping RSS readers with a wall of text).
Celebrating America: The Constitution
In celebration of America’s independence, I thought I’d publish 3 posts about the most important document that most Americans haven’t laid eyes on in years, if not decades: the Constitution of the United States of America. Despite being freely and widely available, not many people have read it recently, if at all, yet it sets down the rules about what you and the government can and cannot do. It’s worth your time to read it. The full text of the Constitution is after the break (to avoid swamping RSS readers with a wall of text).
Increase productivity by doing 50% less
I’ve noticed something funny about toilet paper dispensers over the years. Some facilities, in order to save money, switch to really cheap toilet paper that seems to inspire the need to just use more of the stuff. As I’ve never worked in facilities management, I have no idea whether they actually save that much money doing so. The best restrooms have good quality toilet paper but the dispenser rolls much more slowly than at other places. You can’t spin it like the Wheel of Fortune and win an entire tree as a prize. I’d wager they waste less money on toilet paper, not because they buy the cheap stuff, but because they dispense less of the good stuff. Less is more.
Likewise, most of the effective, sustainable diets out there seem to advocate still eating good stuff, high quality, tasty food, just not as much of it. I’ve never seen a credible diet plan that says eat as much as you can of this crappy, low quality, low calorie food. Less is more.
In contrast, there are an awful lot of “productivity” plans out there that seem to encourage binging or switching to exceptionally low quality communication. There are services and plans that encourage you to limit every email to 5 sentences or 3 sentences or 140 characters. There are productivity plans that encourage you to get just as much email as ever, but only respond to it twice a day. Do these plans work? Sure, in the short term, just like you save a bit of money on the cheap toilet paper or you reduce your weight temporarily by binging on 22 pounds of only celery a day. But they’re not sustainable in the long term.
So here’s an idea for you to try. See if this makes sense to you. Instead of switching to ever cheaper “email paper” and dispensing just as much, if not more, what if you switched up to the good stuff and dispensed less of it? Try this. Go to your Sent Items folder. Count how many emails you sent on average in the last 7 days. Let’s say you sent 100 emails in 7 days. Now cut that in half. You’re allowed to send 50 emails in 7 days. They can be verbose, they can be terse, they can be whatever you want them to be, but you’re basically allotted 7 emails a day to send, and not a single email after that.
What might happen?
- You’ll send fewer emails, which means you’ll get fewer replies, which means you’ll have less to send a reply to. That alone will help.
- This should get you thinking about whether you need to respond to an email at all, or you can just let it be archived and filed away. You might, for example, stop hitting reply-all 250 times a day with what are effectively valueless responses like “I agree” or “Got it”.
- This should get you thinking about the content of the messages you do send. By having fewer opportunities to send something, you might have to condense your value into a small pile of highly valuable messages.
- By creating a bit of scarcity in your responses, the people on the other end might even come to value your messages even more. “Wow, he only responds when it’s important, so this must be important.”
If other “productivity” plans haven’t worked out for you for managing your ever-increasing inbox, try this one. See if it changes your habits, see if it reduces your inboxes, and leave a comment with your results.
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