By Josh McCoy
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-06-30
While goofing off in Google Webmaster Tools this afternoon, I was transitioning between clients dashboards when I recognized the newest addition in Webmaster Tools offerings, +1 Metrics.
I haven't been too excited to start following the +1 social movement from Google. However, as I often say though, if Google gives you an offering in Webmaster Tools, then they are using this data for their benefit too. So, I guess I just became sold on the idea of using +1 for sites. I love it how Google forces me to follow, this is probably why I am so stubborn in every other element of my life. I try to hold off in Search and Social to see if a trend is worth the work, but as usual I am forced to follow in the long run.So what's in the new offering?
Search Impact
This area is much like the search queries section, but think annotated impressions vs. annotated clicks in place of simply impressions vs. clicks. This is Google's way of letting you see the CTR of +1 annotated results. This will be interesting to compare to the Search Queries section to see the true impact on CTR that +1 may have.
Activity
This section is pretty straight forward. It graphs new +1's by day as well as total +1's. Nothing really cool here, but it allows you to quickly assess the hopefully positive trend in your gaining new +1's.
Audience
This area of the +1 Metrics offering takes the activity section to a more granular level of assessing your +1 audience. The by-day graph allows you to take a closer look at unique users who have +1′ed your site content.
I know that this isn't that great of a walk-through, but hey, I just found this today! I think the first thing that most of us need to do is go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/ and start adding our buttons so we can take advantage of the latest Google offering.
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