Google has an obvious interest that as much brands as possible would use its social networking service, Google+, because consequently it will attract more users into the service as they would like to connect with their favorite brands.
But Google also knows that brands don’t like to work “blindly” and so far Google+ didn’t offer any brand page analytics data while its biggest rival Facebook has recently improved its decent pages analytics tool, Insights, to report in real-time.
Now, it appears that Google is about to integrate Google Analytics with Google+ to provide brands quality tracking and measuring abilities for their Google+ page.
The dutch website WebSonic has managed to obtain secret Google documents from some inside company presentation which shows an integration between Google Analytics and Google+ brand pages. Here’s one of the documents screenshot (note the “Google Confidential” statement at the bottom):
We can see from the slide a very simple integration between the products- The page owner simply needs to enter his unique Analytics tracking ID into the box and supposedly the code is implemented into his Google+ brand page (including all the tabs and posts).
On another slide it can be seen that it is possible to create a Google Analytics account directly from Google+ without the hassle of leaving the social network into Google Analytics and then coming back again after creating the account.
The data that would appear on the Page owner Analytics account after the code implementation suppose to be similar to the familiar website data which includes on-page visitors analysis like visits, pages per visit, bounce rate, pageviews, average time on page and also the break down of traffic sources.
Other Google products such as Picasa and Knol (which will shut down later on this year) already allowing this kind of Analytics integration and so it was only natural that it will eventually reach to Google+ as well (and maybe even it should have arrived much sooner).
Another things that appears from the slides is that Google is already experimenting this Analytics-Google+ integration with Audi on its official Google+ page, although probably Audi isn’t the only one and Google also allowing other big brands to take it for a test drive before rolling it out for the general public.
It isn’t Google’s first attempt to provide analysis from the social networking arena- Last month it presented a new set of social reports in Google Analytics for webmasters.