One thing I always wondered about in terms of Google+ statistics and engagement is the ratio of post impressions and clicks. In Google Webmaster Tools we can see how many people have seen our pages in SERPs and how many have clicked through, together with CTRs and average ranking position. In Google+ there are several useful statistical bits such as shares, +1’s, comments, ripples and some tools out there (e.g. Circle Count) collate this information in a nice way and track things over time. Impressions, however, are not there.
Well… not for link shares anyway.
So here’s my favourite trick to gauging engagement on the posts that I share:
Instead of sharing posts in direct link mode, I upload a nice attractive image instead and place the link in the description.
The downside of this method is that the link contains rel=”nofollow”, but it’s something I gladly trade for a nice little “Views” number you see up there in the screenshot. As you can see the post has had around 1000 views while Google Analytics shows roughly 100 visits. So that’s about 10% CTR.
We’re testing this further to ascertain what exactly classifies as a “View”, for example does user have to click on the image so it opens up in lightbox mode, or is it enough to see it in your stream or a standalone post.
Preliminary Results
So far the results are leaning towards the first option. We’ve had a small scale test performed within our team (60 people) and two posts:
a) Please click and open image.
b) Please do not open larger image.
In case a) Google+ shows 127 views, while in case b) there aren’t any statistics at all which hints at a possibility of either value rounding or threshold point after which the views start displaying. The only person that actually viewed the image was me while checking results. I have done it about five times. This could also mean that the views value is for unique visits/visitors and not clocking upwards on each refresh like the good old hit counter.
So there you go, a nice little hack to track the ratio of views and clicks to your content from Google+ posts.
Dan Petrovic, the managing director of DEJAN, is Australia’s best-known name in the field of search engine optimisation. Dan is a web author, innovator and a highly regarded search industry event speaker.
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6886-3211
Dan, your hack is slick. I just want to make people aware that the manner in which they add images to their Google+ posts determines whether or not they will even see a view count number. I name check Dan and expand on his idea in my post here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/108858749171200112503/posts/FoRtq1ttd64
As usual. Awesome post Dan! Glad that you ran an experiment about what Google+ considers as an actual view. I was about to do an experiment about it myself. This saves me a lot of time. Cheers!
That’s a nice find, Dan. Excellent way to get some extra data out of Google+. Can you confirm that the views means people have “opened” the photo?
Nice catch, Dan! This could be really useful for those who want to track these metrics! We’ll be watching to see if you develop any new results on this. Thanks for posting it!
A great way to extrapolate an additional metric from G+.. However, the image says impressions / clicks = CTR, shouldnt this be clicks / impressions = CTR?