WordPress recently did a good series on how to analyze the data that’s available to you via WordPress Blog Stats tool. This series is great if you’ve a WordPress.com blog PLUS it’s a good read for any one in the data analytics role to learn how to write-up content like this.
Along with WordPress Stats, I also use data from the Google Webmaster Tools. It’s a great way to see Keywords, Top posts & pages from a search engine point of view. It’s always good to have a healthy number of people searching for your content on search engines like Google.
I hope you take a look at how Data Analytics can help your Blog Grow. The series that WordPress ran focused on their platform but if you run your blog on other platform, this should give you a good sense of how to analyze the blog statistics.
I’ve been using Google Alerts for more than a year now and I thought I’ll talk about how it helps me keep track of who is talking about XYZ on the web. here XYZ could be a brand, your full name, your competitor’s name, your company name among other things.
So why should you care?
Well, whether you know it or not, someone out there is talking about your brand, about YOU or about your company. you can’t control that – but what you can do is to “Monitor” it. Keep an eye out on what people are talking about YOU or your brand on the internet. That way, you get to stay current w/ the conversations about things that matter to you.
And If you’re a blogger then you can set up an alert for when your blog gets found (a.k.a indexed) by Google – nice! right?
In this post, I’ll share how I learned to track an email campaign via Google Analytics.
First up, what do I mean by email campaign?
let’s say you email 1000 newsletter subscribers a link (URL) along w/ a summary – How do you track the traffic that is generated via this email campaign? Well – that’s where Google analytics can help you track your email campaigns. One metric would be how may people clicked on that link and visited your site.
Why should I care?
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” – Peter Drucker
If you do not measure what’s working or what’s not working, then you can’t improve – can you? Let’s take a hypothetical example. supposing it’s cost you $25 dollars to email 1000 people. How do you calculate the ROI on it? Well – track it! And the tool you can consider using is Google Analytics.
Now, Here are the steps to track an email campaign via Google Analytics:
Here’s the visual:
Here are the steps:
1. First Step is to create an URL.
Why do you need this? Basically this URL would have “meta data” that helps Google Analytics identify this link belongs to one of the campaigns.
Data Collection limit: You should not send more than 10 million hits per month. If you exceed this limit, there is no assurance that the excess hits will be processed. Data Freshness limit: Sending more than 200,000 visits per day to Google Analytics will result in your reports being refreshed only once per day
And to take it further, I wanted to know how many website in USA get greater than 10 million hits per month, turns out only 108 websites in US get that much traffic. Source: http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites/US?jump-to=108
so from data collection limit standpoint, only these 100 odd sites would exceed the limitations of Google Analytics.
To put things in Perspective: MySpace.com does not exceed Data Collection Google Analytics Limit:
Conclusion
Just knowing about the Data Collection Limit was not interesting but I combined data from other data sources – it seemed very interesting to me! Anyhoo – In this post, I shared:
> Limitations of Google Analytics
> Answered How many websites in USA exceed the limitations of Google Analytics?
[UPDATE Feb 10th 2013] I made a mistake in correlating data from Quantcast and Google Analytics. Lesson learned:double-check for units when comparing data from two different sources
Florin Dumitrescu pointed out that while Quantcast uses People/Month and Google uses hits/month. They may NOT be always the same. Sorry about this.
@paras_doshi interesting post, but quantcast seem to measure the number of people/month, while the Analytics limitations are for hits/month
Note: These projects may not be ready to be used in your production environment as some of them are in Beta/Experimental stages and their support/development may be deprecated in future.
Thanks: I thought of writing this blog post after a discussion I had with Parth Acharya about Google and it’s projects for Data Professionals. He pointed me to some of the most interesting samples that used Google Fusion Tables and here’s his one of the blog post on related topic: Google Fusion Table & Data Visualization
This seems like a great way to visualize where your fans are from. In my case, most of them are from India and so one actionable insight would be to schedule posts based on Time Zone in India. And I can imagine that such reports could be very helpful to brands who have sizable fan following on Facebook.
Here’s the screenshot:
Thanks to the following blog-posts for inspiration:
Recently, Google announced something called authorship markup. Basically what it does is that it shows the author information (Only Google Profile) along with search results. I found it interesting. Here’s why: Now Notice that the first result is “Normal”.
Now Notice second result. It has: 1) Author’s photo (Via Google Profile) 2) Author’s Name 3) Link to G+ profile 4) Number of Circles the author belongs to
And so I thought I would do that for my WordPress.com Blog (Not a self hosted WordPress blog but a wordpress.com blog). But challenge for me was that I didn’t get all information at one place. I had to watch three-four videos and read three-four blog posts before I was able to “figure it out”. So I thought I would share how I did it. So here we go:
Now the basic concept is that: – Your Content should link to your Google+ Profile – Your Google+ Profile should link back to your content
How to go about doing that in WordPress.com?
So I have an “About me” page on my blog. Now if you do not have a about me page – please create one. (Now there are others ways but i found this approach to be best) Now Go to WordPress Admin Page > Appearance > Menu > Screen Options (Top Right corner) > Check the “Link Relationship” in advanced settingsNow you need to add the word author in the Link Relatonship Text Page, Like shown below: “Save Menu”
Now Go to your About Me page and Go to Edit Here you will need to add a hyperlink like this:
Now, Here the href has the link to Your Google Profile And Edit the “Title” And the Hyper-Link’s Text to your Name. Keep ‘+’ in Hyper-linked Text.
Now Next step, Go to your Google profile > About > Edit Profile So note that i have added the Link:
http://parasdoshi.com/about-me/
In my Google Profile. You should add the Full URL of your “about me” page in the contributor to section of the Google Profile.
DONE! So Summarizing: 1) Add About me Page (If you do not have one) 2) Edit the About me Page’s Link Relationship To Author (From Menu) 3) Add the rel=me hyperlink in your about me page that points to your Google Profile 4) Edit the Google Profile’s contributor to section with the Link to your “About Me” Page.
Does it work? Verify it via Google’s Rich Snippet Tool: Here, Enter your Blog URL and click on Preview. Here’s Mine: Note the Message:
