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:

Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=[searchquery]

Yahoo:
http://us.search.yahoo.com/search?p=[search query]

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:

Anyway, if you are not using Sitecatalyst from Omniture you can still have a glimpse of social networks analytics with Google Analytics check this post I wrote some time ago: How to track visits from social bookmarks with Google Analytics .

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.

Since I’m constantly trying to improve my workflow I’m always looking for new add-ons and extension to customize my Firefox installation.

Last time I wrote a list of the most useful Firefox SEO extensions, this time I’ll go through all the Firefox extensions for Google Analytics I’m currently using on my machine.

The main purpose of this extensions is to ease user’s life and also getting a better overview on Analytics: access quickly to custom reports, quickly identify domains, import and export data as fast as possible.

WASP: If it is not the best one from the lot, probably is the most complete of all. It’s not Google Analytics specific, you can use with pretty much any online marketing and analytics solution on the market. It comes with a standalone crawler and it can also provide detailed information about the data being collected trough Query String and Cookies by web analytics solutions (called “tags”, “trackers” or “web bug”) not only by Google Analytics.

GA: this tiny bit of code just tells you if Google Analytics is running on the page you currently visiting. Not big deal. Still useful for those who need to do some reverse web-engeneering… Here’s the author’s homepage.

Fire Analytics: Google Analytics gets as close as one click away with this extension. Set up your personal Analytics account and and flick through your stats straight from Firefox.

Better google analytics: awesome compilation of GreaseMonkey script to enhance your Google stats. It comes with media and social metrics, import&export of tables and dates.

Goal Copy: This extension basically is a work around for those who have a bunch of accounts with the same goals and want to manage them in the easiest way possible. It’s more for the pro-user with an intense use of Analytics, but it might come handy for the most as well.

Google Analytics Notes : this one is for those who have loads of accounts to manage and need to distinguish in between account leaving some notes around. Basically it adds a ‘Show Notes’ button in the GA menu ba. Here’s the author’s page.

Counterpixel: The tool tries to find counting/measurement pixel of tracking software from different services and companies. It’s a good alternative to Ghostery, which I have already mentioned on this post.

Have you ever wondered of being able to see visitor’s IP addresses with Google Analytics?

It’s actually posssible. It’s an old trick but it works pretty well…

Actually I can think of enough scenarios in which to apply this one:

• we want to track competitors visitors
• we want to exclude our own ip address from reports
• we have to exclude several different ip address on an internal network
• we want to find out who’s posting spam on our blog’s comments
• many more…

1. Getting to know custom filters

The weirdest thing though is that we can easily filter ip with custom filters. While creating a custom filter we can set up the IP address as a parameter… even if Google hides it from us.

When creating a custom filter (click on Filter Manager, then Add Filter and from the drop-down menu select Custom Filter) we have to choos the first parameter (Field A -> Extract A) to which makes our filter work. The IP address option is hidden.

2. Hide & Seek

If we’re clever enough to take a peak into the source coude on line we’ll find this on line 76:

<option value="30">Visitor Flash version</option>
<option value="31">Visitor IP Address</option>
<option value="32">Visitor Geographical Domain</option>

The chance to track IP address it’s right there, but to use it we have to write the line down in the drop-down menu… Anyway. It does not work, but we can sort it out anyway.

Back in 2006 someone found this out, then Google quickly patched it.

Still there’s some way to get what we’re looking for.

3. Gotcha!

Giving the right variable to track to the _trackPageview() call we can store all the visitors IPs.

The PHP code would look like this:

pageTracker._setVar("<?php echo $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];?>");

…it works!

There’s only a problem: it is not legal. According to Google Analytics Terms of Service:

7. PRIVACY . You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use
the Service to track or collect personally identifiable information of
Internet users, nor will You (or will You allow any third party to)
associate any data gathered from Your website(s) (or such third
parties' website(s)) with any personally identifying information from
any source as part of Your use (or such third parties' use) of the
Service. You will have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy and
will comply with all applicable laws relating to the collection of
information from visitors to Your websites. You must post a privacy
policy and that policy must provide notice of your use of a cookie that
collects anonymous traffic data.

It’s a silly restriction honestly. Everyone is still able to parse is own server logs and find out who is who. On the other hand it shows Google’s care for privacy of his users and all internet users. It definetely makes a point for them.

Anyway, it’s a neat trick and still it’s worth to talk about it for the sole purpose of spreading some “hacking” mentality to people working in analytics and marketing.

Disclaimer

This technique is a violation of Google Analytics Terms of Service. This technique might result in Google suspending your account or even worse. I reject any responsability for any consequence of this. This post is intended only for educational purpose.

I don’t mean to break any rules (neither want anybody to do that because of this post) but playing around with code can lead us to interesting discoveries, making us more aware of the tools we use everyday rather than being just simple users… it’s just up to you.

This is a good example on how versatile Analytics is. If someone though putting out Analytics would have been only to get on a massive amount of date (even if users are allowed to keep their statistics out of Google’s sight), I guess it just a great added value to Google’s brand as it’s getting closer to other big analytics names like Webtrends or Nedstat.

Anyway, this article explains in depth how to start tracking article campaigns on Analytics. Since sending press releases around has become a standard practice in web promotion strategy, this one will help you out in case you need to get exact figures about that traffic.

According to the Statcounter guys, Firefox 3 is finally overtaking MS Explorer 6. The overall figures show the Internet Explorer 6 and 7 marketshare dropping of 5% while Firefox has grown of 2 points from february last year.

While these figure may not be impressive, it was just to point out the great real time service on browser shares offered by Statcounter:

You can find it here, stats are updated daily.

As reported by the official Google Analytics Blogs, it is now possible to find out how many users are using an Iphone to browse your pages. Rather than a revolution it’s just another natural step towards the complete segment management feature of Analytics.

If you’re getting curious about this, take a look to this page, the guys at Google analytics know pretty well how to explain the segment feature. It’s kind of tricky at first, you just need to get used to it and it’s perfect.

Anyway, it could be cool to be able to get stats not only from Iphone users but also from all top-class mobile users. If you are into this, this guy who looks pretty much into analytics just came out with a regular expression which discriminates browsers for screen resolutions, hence finding out who’s got an tiny mobile browser.