Google is getting more social

Its been an interesting week so far with Google and the world of social media. With the launch of Google+ their own social media project to rival Facebook and the launch of +1 buttons within the search environment. This move shows Google are taking notice that recommendations of content by friends is becoming amajor influence on web traffic. For a while now you have been able to see the latest social feed from sites such as Twitter, in the natural search results. Now in order to track the influence of all the social media engagement you have on line Google have integrated a search impact report into Google Analytics. This means you can now measure the impact social media has on your website traffic.

Within the Google Webmaster Tools you can measure:

• The Search Impact report, this gives you an idea of how +1 recommendations affect your natural search traffic. You can measure to see if your click through rate changes when someone recommends your content, by comparing clicks and impressions on search results with and without +1 annotations.
• To see how many times your pages have been +1′d the Activity report will detail clicks from your site and from other pages including the natural search.
• To understand the geographic and demographic information visit the Audience report detailing information about the individuals who’ve +1’d your pages.

Within the Google Analytics package you can view the following types of information.

• See site behavior changes for visits to your website that include clicks on +1 buttons or other social engagement. This information will inform you as to whether people who +1 your pages during a visit to your site are more likely to spend time there than individuals who don’t.
• The Social Actions report enables you to observe the number of +1 clicks, Tweets, Facebook Likes and other social recommendations happening on your site, all in one place.
• The Social Pages report compares the pages on your site to determine which are driving the highest the number of social recommendations.

This is fantastic news for website managers and marketing professionals as we can now measure and quantify the impact of our social activity directly against our website traffic.