Category: Analytics
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
There’s a new service from the guys over at StumbleUpon that acts as a Twitter update client, a stat counter, a URL shorter and more all rolled into one. I’ve been using it for a couple days now, and it’s pretty cool. It’s still in private beta at the moment, but they post invite codes fairly often on their Twitter feed. It was developed with input from Tim Ferris of “The Four Hour Work Week” fame and it promises to take care of many of the issues that come with promoting your blog on Twitter. According to StumbleUpon, it is a…
…brand new short url service designed to drive more traffic to your site. Su.pr provides real time analytics for all of your generated links as well as the ability to post your Su.pr links to other social media services such as twitter and facebook.
Not only does it count how many clicks you recieve from Twitter, but also from StumbleUpon itself, which is handy. It keeps track of when you posted and how many clicks you recieved, so over time it can suggest when the most profitable time to tweet would be. What? You’ll be away from your computer at the most profitable tweeting time? No problem. Just schedule your tweet for later. Here’s a screenshot.
On the URL shortening side, the best features are still in the pipeline. The plan is to allow blog owners to use their own domain name rather than su.pr domain in the shortened URLs. They’re also going to allow site owners specify if they want a 301 redirect for SEO purposes.
All sorts of interesting things are happening with this application at the moment, so you might want to check it out.
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
Adding Google Analytics to your Wordpress blog enables you to see how many people are actually visiting your site. You can also find out where they came from, what they were searching for, what they read, and how long they stayed. There are tons of options when it comes to analytics software, but Google Analytics is one of the easiest to set up and it does everything I need (my only complaint is the lack of real time stats). Today I’ll walk you through the process of setting it up. All you really have to do is add a small chunk of Javascript to every page that you want Google to track. It is possible to manually add it to your theme, but if you were to switch Wordpress themes, your changes would be gone. So I’m going to show you how to use a plugin to add it instead. This way theme changes won’t be an issue.
1. Sign up for Google Analytics
It’s pretty straight forward. You can use an existing Google account to sign up, but it’s not required. Go here to sign up: http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html. At the end of the sign up process, you will get a piece of code. We won’t actually be using all that code, but it’s not a bad idea to save it anyway (it’s not the easiest to find later on if you ever end up needing it).
2. Install a plugin
There are plenty of choices when it comes to Wordpress plugins for Google Analytics. I prefer to use Google Analytics for Wordpress by Joost de Valk. Not only has this plugin received great reviews, Joost is an active member of the Wordpress community. Download the plugin, unzip it, and upload it to your Wordpress plugins directory.
3. Configure the plugin
Login to Wordpress and go to your Plugins page. Find the plugin you just uploaded and click Activate. Now for the plugin to actually work, it needs to know your UA string. This was buried in the code that Google gave you when you signed up. However, there’s an easier way to find it. While you’re logged into Google Analytics, go to the home page by clicking the Google Analytics logo in the top left corner. The home page will list all the sites that you’re using Google Analytics on (there will just be one at this point if you’re setting up analytics for the first time). Just to the right of your domain name, there will be a number. That’s your UA string. Copy it. You’re almost finished. Now go back to Wordpress and go to Plugins>Google Analytics. There will be a warning alerting you that Google Analytics is not active because you haven’t entered your UA string. The UA string goes in the first textbox (it’s labeled Analytics Account ID). Make sure that the Where should the tracking script be placed? option is set to In the footer. You don’t want the user to have to wait for your analytics script to run before viewing your page, so it’s best to load it in the footer. You can adjust all sorts of other settings if you want, but it isn’t really necessary. Click Update Settings and you should be on your way.
Keep in mind that Google Analytics does not give you real-time statistics, so you might have to wait a day or so before you can check on your traffic.
Monday, June 15th, 2009
So to be honest, I don’t know the real advantages to using Feedburner to distribute your RSS feeds, but I’m about to find out. I know quite a few major Care to learn with me? I’m going to sign up for a Feedburner account, set it up, play around with it, and if I don’t see the benefits, I’ll go do some more research.
1. Claim your feed
Go to feedburner.com and sign in using your Google account. If you don’t have one, go ahead and get one (it’s free!). Type in your blog or feed address and hit next.
If you have a seperate feed for your comments, Feedburner will ask you which feed is your source. Choose your regular feed (not your comments feed) and continue. Next you’ll have the opportunity to change your feed title and feed address.
Make some changes if the defaults don’t suit you, then click next.
Record your new feed link. You’ll need it a little later on.
2. Feed stats
Now we’re getting to the good stuff. It looks like Feedburner is analytics for you RSS feeds. According to their website, they track:
- Subscription data (e.g. number of subscribers by day, previous week, last 30 days and all time) and Reach data (the estimated number of individuals clicking or viewing your feed content in a given day)
- Breakdown of feed readers and aggregators, email services, web browsers and bots by which subscribers are accessing your content
- Clickthrough tracking
- Uncommon uses — sites where your content has been resyndicated including other blogs, directories and even spam sites
- Item enclosure downloads (podcasts)
- Live hits, conveniently translated to your local time zone
They track a number of things by default, but give the option to enable additional tracking points. I’ve checked all the additional points (all two that is) except the one that involves podcasting, since I’m not doing any of that at the moment.
3. Integrate with Wordpress
Finally, they even offer a Wordpress plugin for easy integration.
Clicking the link will take you to a page with instructions for installing the plugin. Once you have the plugin installed, go to Settings>Feedburner and enter the feed URL that you recorded in step one and click Save.
4. Test it out
Alright, now that everything is set up, go visit your blog and click your RSS link. It should send you to your brand new Feedburner RSS feed. You can also visit Feedburner and login with your Google account to view your stats.
So it looks like the advantage to using Feedburner is that you can track your RSS subscribers. That’s definitely an essential part of understanding your traffic. I already use Google Analytics to track my website traffic (and I’ll write about that in the future) and now I’m glad I have Feedburner keeping track of my subscribers.
Do you use something other than Feedburner to publish your RSS feeds? Tell us a little about what you use and why in the comments below. Thanks!
