How To Track Google Web Stories

Google is constantly looking for new ways to improve its search results, not only with more relevant results but with rich media options to give users more options when looking for content or researching a certain topic. Search not only leads to text pages but images, video, PDFs and now stories.

Stories pioneered by Snapchat have become a popular format, and social media sites have copied the content format and released it onto platforms, making it the norm for Internet users. Every day millions of people are consuming this content format, and Google wanted in on the action.

Google was in a bit of a pickle; it released AMP pages as a way to improve the mobile serving of web pages, but with responsive design and progressive web apps. The AMP service didn't have any unique selling points other than Google giving it a bump in search and some monetisation options.

It became more of a publisher tool that only some large sites used; otherwise, it was widely disregarded, and Google needed a way to repurpose the format. Instead of giving up on it, it looks to revitalise it by jumping on the stories trend with its own product, Google Web stories.

Web Stories are a visually rich, full-screen content format for the web, which allows you to tap or swipe through stories. To consume content, you can tap or swipe through Web Stories. Google supports Web Stories, so you might find them across Google Search and Discover.

Before you start a stories campaign

As is the case with AMPs, Google is starting to give these formats quite the bit of real estate in mobile and app search and via Discovery and actively encouraging sites to leverage the format to populate the feeds. Those doing so might hit niches and search trends they otherwise would not have and could be a way to broaden your SEO reach.

Now before you rush out and start creating stories, you have to consider that this is a new content format, you are going to have to create visually appealing content and the right search terms, and if you're flying blind, you could end up wasting your time.

If you are going to dedicate time and resources to this new web format, you're going to want to track it to see if it drives traffic and impacts your bottom line.

Tracking in WordPress

If you've tagged up your site using Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager, you will automatically get page view tracking on all your web stories hosted on your domain like you would any page on your site.

If you're using WordPress, Google already has a plugin ready with tracking added to it. All you need to do is supply either your UA or GA4 tracking ID, add it to the plugin, and you're done. Once the format starts to gain traffic, you will be a host of events populated in your analytics account.

Each story will show up as a unique event category with the page title of the story, and each event will have the following event actions attributed to it. So you can judge which stories resonate with your audience and how long they should be to get the best results.

1. story_pages_viewed
2. story_page_count
3. story_complete

Tracking using third-party services

If you're using a CMS that doesn't have web stories built-in or has a third-party web stories integration, what you can do is either provide your Google Analytics tracking code to the platform or enable a subdomain via the 3rd party platform using your domain. If you're looking for 3rd party tools to get started, I would recommend checking out platforms like:

• https://makestories.io/
• https://www.nws.ai/
• https://webstoryz.com/
• https://www.zmooz.com/

Or find more tools on the AMP documentation site.

• https://amp.dev/documentation/tools/?format=stories

Tracking with a custom web story build

If you're thinking of building out a native solution for your website, but want to have the custom event tracking, you will need to enable custom events in your page structure. You can then capture those custom events using your Google Tag Manager and push them into your Google Analytics account.

Here's a great guide on how to set up tracking on your AMP pages

You can use the following tool to test your web stories setup and ensure that it's marked up correctly for Google crawlers to find.

• https://search.google.com/test/amp

Tracking in search console

If you've enabled web stories on your site, it's highly recommended that you create a separate XML sitemap to host all your web story URLs. Add this XML sitemap to your search console to help with web story discovery.

Google will find web stories on your domain without this step, but pointing them in the right direction has never harmed the process. Once Google finds your web stories and indexes them, you will find data on your publications under the discover section.

You will see data such as impressions and clicks for each published story.

Tracking with Google Analytics

If you're thinking about moving some of your SEO efforts into web stories and would like help setting up tracking or custom reporting for this new format, we are happy to assist you with the process.

Contact us

If you want to know more about digital marketing or feel this entire GA thing is too much of a bother and you need it sorted by experts, then we’re happy to assist. Simply contact us and we can sort out your data migration for you.

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Recommended reading

If you enjoyed this post and have a little extra time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, why not check out the following posts about Google Analytics?

• How To Track Social Sharing In Google Analytics
• Get Back Your Google Analytics Account With These Simple Steps
• How To Properly Set Up Google Analytics With Shopify Sites
• Google Analytics Interaction Hit Vs Non-Interaction Hit
• How To Track Video Views With Google Analytics
• How To Track Search and Zero Search Queries In Google Analytics

Tags: Data Analytics, Marketing, Big Data, Google Analytics