I have been testing how many times users attempt to view the canvas page of a Google gadget.

The test involved two parts…
1) How many people clicked the “maximize” button (this is the button that wold take a user to the canvas page of a google gadget) without being prompted.
2) How many people would click through to the canvas page when prompted with an image.

My test involved over 10 million gadget views of my example Google gadgets (about three weeks worth).

Just so we all know what I am talking about here, a view of the canvas page happens when a user of a Google gadget clicks the “maximize” button on the top right hand side of a gadget as shown in the image.

When enlarged, the gadget displays the canvas page.

The canvas page for the fox gadget shown looks like this…

The button is the default button for all Google gadgets. It is always there on every gadget whether or not that gadget even has a canvas (or larger) option. I wondered how many people actually used it.

Not many.

There were less than .001 percent of users trying out this button.

That was less than I had expected, but then I tried inserting an image that made it more obvious that the gadget can be enlarged as shown to the right.

Even with the more obvious image promting people to make the gadget larger, there were still a small amount of users doing so.

The numbers were…

Monkey Gadget:

Displayed 1.5 million times, canvas views – 4500

Puppy Gadget:

Displayed 1 million times, canvas views – 3500

Other gadgets:

Displayed 8 million times, total canvas views – 20,000 or so.

The bottom line of this experiment is that as little as .3 to 1 percent of users are seeking out the canvas page, even when prompted with an image.

This means that if you are planning to use the canvas page your call to action needs to be pretty damn strong. For this experiment I used an image, I am now experimenting on how a text link to the canvas page will perform.