I have that monkey gadget I am always talking about. It has 110,000 users, but what does that really mean?

This gadget gets over ten million views a month.

It is hard to keep track of gadget views especially since the Google gadget directory stop showing views (now they only show users).

Since the files for Google gadgets are cached by Google and displayed from that cache, it is hard to know how many times the gadget is actually displayed.

Since there are essentially two APIs for gadgets now (legacy and new) it even gets harder.

There are two ways provided by Google to let you know your numbers. The first one has a new way to do so from Google Labs.

Google Analytics:

From Google labs, there is gadget tracking.

You can track not just the gadget views,but also the interactions with your gadget like…

ga.reportEvent("Counter Gadget", "Increment", "Button");
ga.reportEvent("Counter Gadget", "Reset", "Button");

There is even “Event Tracking”…

The event method provides a different model for you to use with gadget tracking. First, event calls are calculated separately from page view calls, and the resulting data is displayed in a separate part of the Google Analytics Content reports. Thus, you could track the view of a gadget sepately from user interactions on the gadget, without having user interaction inflate the overall numbers for gadget views. Secondly, this method employs the event tracking model, whose structure is specifically designed to analyze user interaction on gadgets. In this model, both label and value are optional parameters.

Event tracking is in beta I think still but will come out soon.

To use Google analytics with the legacy gadget api (older gadgets), you can find instructions here.