With the recent announcement that Google will transform into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships, Google+ has suddenly become an integral part of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) that you see. Then, how do you figure out and analyze just how influential you are on Google+?
Yesterday, Google announced a major change that is hugely relevant to travel bloggers who have a significant following on Google+. For anyone looking to analyze and establish benchmarks for Google+, All my + is a free tool that offers an easy way to pull engagement and activity figures.
To find a complete overview of a user’s Google+ activity, simply locate their Google+ profile ID which is found within the URL (e.g., https://plus.google.com/u/0/100556897150850716981/. The bit you are after is just the number in red.), place it in the box located in the top left corner of the page and submit the query. “All my +” will then generate an overview chart like this:
The overall metric I found most useful for measuring engagement on Google+ combined the total +1’s, reshares and comments per post. While I did see a number of accounts with thousands and thousands of followers, I am not so sure follower counts or total postings are numbers you should focus on when it comes to engagement. It may also be worth pointing out that “impressions” or anything similar play absolutely no role at all in the analysis.
Out of curiosity, I started submitting the profile IDs of travel bloggers that I thought may be highly influential. While I was not able to submit queries for everyone in the travel blogging community, I did search a good number of travel influencers I was familiar with from my own experience. I have not included my list of findings as I am sure I missed a few important bloggers and the list is not the point of this post.
What I found was that Paul Steele, with a total of 13.17 actions per post, was well ahead of the others I used for a sample comparison. In fact, I collected the +1, reshare and comment per post figures for a selection of over fifty travel bloggers and, of those sampled, not another single user was within 80% of 13.17.
As with any social media influence analysis, you will find that there are many different ways to interpret numbers. However, “All my+” will certainly provide some basic signals of user activity and engagement.
What is your total engagement per post on Google+? Are you a travel company, tourist board or PR flack? Do you find these kinds of free tools useful?
Image: arquera
If you’re a Web publisher (a term that encompasses bloggers), social networks are a means to an end, not the end in themselves. I’m much more interested in how our site influences our target audience: people who are researching European trips. And because of that, the metrics that I find most interesting are:
– Visits and unique visitors
– Pageviews
– Engagement statistics
– Revenue (especially from affiliate programs, which directly reflect our influence on readers)
Also, the engagement statistics that I find especially interesting are under “Audience/Behavior/Engagement” in the new Google Analytics interface. I look at:
1) The percentage of pageviews that come from visits of 30 minutes or more; and…
2) The percentage of pageviews that come from visits of 20+ pages.
These numbers give a sense of what a site’s core audience is, and what kind of influence a site has with readers.
I’m not surprised that Paul ranked so high. He was an enthusiastic early-adopter when Google+ launched and has been posting regularly and frequently ever since. He ranked high in the results I got with the new Google social search too. http://screencast.com/t/LhLoGdvT