Jackson Lo

Our good friends at Yoast published a great tutorial on how to create and add the Google +1 button to your website (they are truely a swifty bunch).

I added the button to my website a day after the launch and got the Event Tracking in Google Analytics synced up nicely. I also added one additional piece of code to the script (you’ll soon find out what that is). This is what you would see in Google Analytics if you did an clean install of the button:

The click data feeds into your Event Tracking section under your Content Report.

The additional piece of code I added gives you insight, in Google Analytics, which page your visitor clicked the Google +1 button. My good colleague, Jordan Louis, figured this one out (thank you Jordan!). The code fires upon a click, and once someone clicks on the button, it turns it on (event action = ‘on’). By going into the event action, you can see the event labels listed there.

In case you are not familiar with event tracking, here is a link to the Event Tracking Fundamentals.

Here is the additional piece of code you can add to your event tracking script:

<script type=“text/javascript”>

function plusone_vote( obj ) {
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','plusone',obj.state, document.location.href]);
}
</script>

… TA DA!

Now you’ve got all your ‘on’ and ‘off’ events from the Google +1 button with the page URLs in Google Analytics! I went on a bit of a clicking marathon around my pages to get some data in here for you all to see, so don’t mind that, I know my data is corrupted with invaluable clicks on the Google +1 button.

Additional articles

Google +1 by Distilled.net.

We’ll see in the coming weeks/months what type of insight we can pull from this data.

Any thoughts or ideas where the Google +1 tracking data will take us?