Although designed as yet another snackable content, Google web stories has managed to distinguish itself from the crowd with its fast-loading pieces of innovative short length content. By blending text, images, videos, and animations into a easily digestible package, this swipeable micro-content, although not the first of its kind, is fast becoming popular even amongst its many competitors as the new channel for website traffic, thus, providing an exciting way of creating content that can be viewed in both mobile and desktop formats.
In this article, we will explore the various ways of using Google web stories to boost website traffic. We will discuss the various features and benefits associated with this format, its potential applications, as well as providing some tips on how to create engaging web stories.
What are web stories?
Powered by AMP technology, Google web stories are basically just the Google Ad version of interactive storytelling that shares information with audiences through tappable content that uses text, images, videos, and animations to provide an engaging way for users to quickly consume relevant content about a brand or product.
Web stories appear as in standard Google search results and as carousels in Google Discover. You can also add them to your website and share them on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more.
Google web stories are fast becoming popular among content creators because of their immense earning potential as well as the sheer volume of traffic they can generate. They can now host them on their website or blog, and share brand narratives and or promote products to them via individual story panels. With the right strategy, content creators can leverage web stories to attract more customers and drive engagement. Furthermore, content creators can use them in tandem with other digital marketing strategies such as SEO and content marketing for greater success.
They allow marketers to easily communicate their message in an immersive and engaging way that’s optimized for mobile devices, while customers can access the information they need quickly and efficiently. Google Web Stories offer an unprecedented opportunity for content creators to have complete creative control over their own storytelling, from the marketing to the monetization, and even allow them to refresh old posts relevant along with their new content.
Benefits of Google web stories
For users
For users, Google web stories presents a fantastic experience of bite-sized content made interactive through its clickable links and left/right navigation through other related stories from other sources. In many ways, it brings together the perpetual presence of Google Ads with the immersive experience of Instagram stories and carousels. You end up with various categories of content – educational, entertainment, and promotional- that you can consume ‘on the go’ so to speak.
For content creators:
Flexible content format:
Content formats for Web stories, carousels in the case of Google Discover, presents the ability to create flexible new content through text, video, images, and animations, repurpose and promote old content. They are also extremely customizable as you can change the design, text, and videos/images to fit your brand image and guidelines.
Monetization
You can promote and monetize web stories the same way as you promote programmatic ads – online advertising. Moreover, with tools like AdSense and Google Ads Manager you can also create targeted campaigns for Web stories, carousels and other web story ads. According to research, these ads are more effective than traditional display ads because they are interactive and engaging which leads to higher engagement and better ad performance.
Reach:
Its interactive engagement through its tap-through format makes web stories have tremendous potential for vital distribution and monetizations. Being currently available in the USA, India, and Brazil, the format is quickly expanding to more countries, making it easier for marketers to reach a global audience.
Furthermore, Google web stories can be viewed across multiple devices and are optimized for every size. Furthermore, users don’t need to download any additional software or app, making the experience more seamless. This makes the reach all the more versatile.
Finally, even using website extensions, web stories can be repurposed easily in the form of landing pages, social media links, homepages, and so much more. This makes it easier for marketers to reach out to a larger audience, while also maintaining consistent messaging across multiple channels.
Analytics and Insights
The analytics of web stories are very similar to AMP stories. It has all the metric analysis such as impressions, total view time, tap-through rate, engagement rate, unique users, etc. Marketers can use this data to measure the success of their story campaigns and make improvements accordingly.
In addition to the analytics, there are also insights which allow marketers to gain a better understanding of their audience. This includes demographic details such as age, gender, device used for viewing stories; geographic locations; and the type of content that engaged viewers the most.
Ownership
Finally, you always own your Google web stories and you have complete control over the content creation, distribution, and promotion instead on having to rely on the platform’s interface, as is the case for all the social media platforms
How to make web stories
Creating Google web stories can be a daunting task if you’re new to the platform. Here is a stepwise process on how to begin creating web stories:
Step 1: Create a storyboard narrative
Before you begin creating your web story, it’s important to have a clear idea of the narrative you want to tell. Start by breaking down your story into its key components such as scenes, characters and themes. Google offers a storyboard script template to help you draft your narrative.
Step 2: Choose an editor
For developers, they can just watch a tutorial from AMP to create a story with custom functionality. Otherwise you can use web story editors like WordPress, MakeStories, and Newsroom AI to create content. For this article, we will discuss how you can use the Web stories for WordPress plugin to help you create and publish your web stories on your WordPress website. This editor offers a page builder (drag and drop), templates, and the option to both access existing assets from your WordPress media library and create custom branded elements. Some tips to keep in mind include:
- Attaching the web story through the document tab. This includes all relevant metadata ensuring maximum search engine compatibility.
- Sync with Google Sitekit to provide analytics and insights for each web story.
- Use clean assets coupled with layered text elements and caption support for videos which are more relatable to search engines
- Optimize images and videos by cropping images to only the visible portion along with replacing GIFs by autoplay loops, and encoding videos at the highest compression with necessary trimming.
- Use Assistive text in the appropriate fields.
- Explore editor shortcuts for better webstory crafting.
- Boosting publishing by embedding them in regular posts and articles.
Step 3: Create your web story
Once you’ve got the basics of crafting a web story, it’s time to create your own. Start by gathering relevant content and assets––such as text, images, videos, etc.––from reliable sources. Then use an online editor or specific tools that allow you to build visually appealing stories within minutes.
Once you have the content and a platform ready, you can start developing your web story. Keep in mind that stories should be engaging, interactive, and optimized for multiple devices. To do this, you may want to consider using features like animation effects, live streaming options, audio introductions and soundtracks, autoplay loops or videos with necessary trimming and cropping.
Step 4: Test story before publishing
Testing your web story involves using various tools like Google Analytics, Sitemaps Report, AMP test tool and Chromium to test the functionality of your story. This will help you identify any errors that may be present and ensure that everything functions properly before it is published. Additionally, this step also helps you make sure that the content is optimized for search engines so people can easily find your web story.
Online spaces for Google web stories
Google Discover:
Google web stories currently available in Google Discover in the US, India, and Brazil. So, you can create stories optimized for mobile and watch them show up in the Google Discover feed.
Search Engine Results:
Google web stories can also be surfaced in search engine results as Story Rich Results, if they are properly optimized. In essence, web stories are indexed the same way as web pages, so they adhere to the same guidelines.
Creator web spaces
Web stories published on your website can then be shared on your blog, your social media platforms, and anywhere else you choose to promote it without being subject to time, material, or space limitations inherent to the respective platforms.
Best Practices for creating Web Stories
General:
- Web stories use interactive elements to engage users. A good way is to employ multiple pages that excite the viewers to tap the subsequent pages for more. Good examples are: viral or trending topics, attractive images, polls, quizzes, and links to different pages.
- Web stories need to be accessible: adding subtitles and captions to stories, transcribing audio, and adding alt text to images.
- Keep video content to less than 15 seconds.
- Be aware of transition timing, especially when you have a lot of text content.
SEO:
Ensure your stories are AMP valid because web stories run on the AMP framework. This means they need AMP structured data
- Web stories are, in essence, pages on your website. Therefore be careful to adhere to SEO practices to ensure your pages are indexed and appear. This includes adding relevant metadata, alt text, and the videos need subtitles.
- Story titles should not be longer than 90 characters.
- Adding third-party content allows you to increase your engagement and dwell time.
- Web stories should be part of a broader URL strategy. For example, using the same directory structure and URL syntax as your blogs and other page content.
Content
- Focus on storytelling, not just click-bait content, whether that be original or copyright content.
- Include eye catching photos or video thumbnails on the cover page.
- Try and use your own images and videos as much as possible instead of employing stock photos.
- Try to keep text as minimal as possible (no more than 200 characters) and instead use along with images to supplement the use of video content.
- Communicate the critical parts of your story at the most within the first 15 pages (users on average only view 11-15 pages of a story)
Web story Analytics:
Most web story editors provide a simple way to use Google Analytics to track the engagement of your content. Use these to measure and optimize the performance of your stories for better results. You can track how users are engaging with each page, which pages users think are most important and so on. Also, ensure that you have calls-to-action on each page in order to direct users to other parts of your website or wherever you want them to go next.
Key performance metrics that can be tracked Google Analytics include:
- Story Starts: Number of users who start reading your story. This is reported as pageviews on Google Analytics.
- Time Spent: The average amount of time users spend reading your story. This can be tracked using the ‘time on page’ metric.
- Scroll Depth: How far down each page do users scroll? Tracking this metric gives you an indication as to which parts of your content are engaging readers more and helps you optimize accordingly.
- Story Pages Viewed: This metric shows how many pages in your story users have read. It’s a great indicator of user engagement and interest. This is reported as story_pages_viewed on Google Analytics.
- Story Completion: This metric shows the percentage of users who have read all the pages in your story. It’s a direct indication of how engaging and captivating your storytelling is. This is reported as story_completion on Google Analytics.
The Events Overview report helps you analyze how users interact with different elements in your story. This report is useful to track how readers interact with specific actions, such as playing a video or clicking a link. Events are reported as events on Google Analytics.
You can also use the Time on Page metric to track how much time readers spend engaged in reading particular parts of your story. This metric is reported as time_on_page on Google Analytics.
Finally, the Referrals report helps you understand where your story views are coming from – which websites or links have users clicked to reach your story. This is reported as referrals on Google Analytics.
Conclusion
Web stories have thus become an essential tool for engaging with readers and growing an audience. Tracking the performance of web stories is a crucial step to understanding how effective they are in telling your story. Although web stories are now only available in the US, India, and Brazil, we can expect the feature to expand quickly across other markets.
Our team at Pixel Street understands the value of web stories and provides comprehensive analytics to help businesses track their performance, measure ROI, and make informed decisions in order to maximize engagement. With our analytics solutions, you’ll be able to gain an accurate overview of your website’s activity and get valuable insights on how to create more effective stories.
