Analytics360 integrates Google Analytics into WordPress
MailChimp has relesead Analytics360, a WordPress plugin which brings Google Analytics in your WordPress dashboard.
I recently came across this really useful wordpress plugins which basically integrates your Google Analytics account straight into your WordPress installation.
I’m quite of an analytics freak I must say, I spend way to much time flickering through browser tabs checking all the different analytics accounts I have.
This WordPress extension comes quite handy, especially when running multiple accounts on the same service (Google Analytics in this case).
360 Analytics does not reduce or modifiy the quality and quantity of information you usually get about your website when logging into your Google Analytics account.
The plugin comes straight from MailChimp and can be used in conjunction with their email marketing services to track the performance of your email campaigns on your site traffic.
By the way: I should start considering how effective are WordPress plugins in terms of marketing… this very extension is quite of an example)
A new search engine has just been launched and it’s time to update our analytics software.
Google hasn’t released any major update to automatically recognize traffic coming from Bing into Google Analytics but I guess it is not gonna take too long.
In the meantime we can easily tweak Google Analytics just playing around with our tracking code.
In order to add Bing as a search engine we need to use the addOrganic function: _addOrganic[domain, search query]
AddOrganic Function: how it works
The addOrganic function has two parameters: domain and search query. It basically tells the Analytic engine to consider some referrals as proper search engines, hence appearing on keyword statistics.
This two parameters are embedded in every search query we forward to a search engine:
So let’s take a look to a standard Bing query: http://www.bing.com/search?q=[search query]
As you can see, the right AddOrganic sintaxy would be the following:
pageTracker._addOrganic("bing.com", "q");
We just need to add this line right before the trackpageview() call into our Analytics code.
I think there’s an obvious update on the way but if you are already getting some decent organic traffic from Bing just add this line and see what happens.
Nowadays we all know the importance of social networks in online marketing. According to this press realease, Omniture is aiming to get his own share in the social media analytics with a specific solution.
If you think about tracking traffic from Facebook is quite of a deal indeed. There’s no specific referrer, no way to track users or pages back.
Even when we decide to launch a campaign using custom-made application, it’s pretty hard to get any statistic feedback on their use and the engagement with users.
A specific add-on was obviously needed.
It is called Double App Measurement for Facebook. The dashboard looks pretty much like this:
Quite an interesting video on how Google Analytics manages and attributes visits coming from bookmarks. When it comes to direct access it’s always hard to actually define its origin, wether it’s a user who has our URL stored in his bookmarks (an usual or he just got the url passed by someone or got it from a media campaign for instance…). There’s plenty of possible scenarios this case can apply to.
The video shows some of Google Analytics limitations and weaknesses (a visitor could come first via the search engine, and come back 10 times directly after that and all those visits would still be attributed to search), but it’s interesting to see how it works with cookies.
We all know the importance in today web of social networks. Nowadays even seo firms consider specific actions such as social media optimization when working on linkbuilding strategies.
The ongoing democratization of the web is leading the internet towards a collaborative juggernaut which autonomsly decides what’s interesting and what it is not… finally the silent majority of the modern world has got a media to express itself. Therefore, a successful internet entity, whether it’s a company or a personal website, has to be able to manage its presence and reputation on social network platforms, also considering this as a standard metric for feedback.
Beside all this gibberish philosophical intro, the bottom line is: can we track traffic (and other metrics) coming from the main social network platforms with Google Analytics?
VKI studios came out with another great extension for firefox which basically appends at the end of each page report a list of social bookmark website in which the page has been mentioned.
By this time, the report includes the following social bookmarks:
Reddit
Stumble Upon
Digg
Delicious
Sphinn (SEO social bookmark)
Mixx
It also checks the page status on Yahoo Website Explorer. I hope this will come handy, but more importantly, to have your pages on one of these social bookmark
This plugin is available only in english and requires GreaseMonkey.
