Track visits from Buzz with Google Analytics

In spite of numerous critics, Google Buzz continues to evolve and add features at a fast pace. Just yesterday the team released a set of official ‘Share on Buzz’ buttons that can be easily added to blogs and websites. Almost immediately people started to adapt it for Blogger's home page or as a bookmarklet to share any site. Personally, I prefer to share pages in Google Reader that has similar tools, because you can collect the entire page and search it’s contents later, if it offers a full RSS feed.

I have also included a compact button on my blog and, after reading Rick Klau’s article, got an idea how to make the button even better: add Google Analytics page tags to track clicks originating from Google Buzz. It’s just a matter of changing the original code to add some parameters to the regular blog post URL. The text you should insert in the Blogger template looks like this:

<a class='google-buzz-button' data-button-style='small-count' expr:data-url='data:post.url + &quot;?utm_source=Buzz&amp;utm_medium=BlogButton&quot;' href='http://www.google.com/buzz/post' title='Post on Google Buzz'/>     
<script src='http://www.google.com/buzz/api/button.js' type='text/javascript'/>

After you save the template, the Buzz button will share the URL with these tags attached to it and every time someone clicks on the Buzz link this will be recorded separately in Analytics. You can change the text highlighted in italics to anything else to make it more relevant for your personal needs. Using this method would bring the data about your Buzz audience to the surface; normally Analytics doesn’t report Buzz as a referrer, as Matt Cutts explained here. Of course, this only works if people share the blog post through this button, not if they use Google Reader or a bookmarklet in the browser, but it’s a start nonetheless. This could probably be adapted for WordPress as well. Ideally larger sites would introduce this, then we could have a better idea about the real usage of Google Buzz.

Together with the new buttons for sharing, the Buzz team launched a small API for buttons and sharing and it can be adapted to create a Google Reader ‘Send To’ link. You may wonder why would you need another way to feed links to Buzz, since sharing does the same thing quicker. But you may want to share something only with specific contact groups or disconnect Reader shares from Buzz completely; in these cases a custom link can make occasional Buzz posts much easier. Use these settings to create it:

Name: Post on Google Buzz     
URL: http://www.google.com/buzz/post?message=${source}: ${title}&url=${url}     
Icon URL: http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/images/google-buzz-16x16.png