Tag Archive for 'statistics'

Cross Posting and Self Promotion

Published
by
Kacey
on April 25, 2008
in Administration and Organization and Getting Started
. 3 Comments

Having only recently started up my WordPress blog, one of my first concerns (beyond the normal woes of “What am I going to write about?” and “Why am I even keeping a blog?”) was how to make sure all the people in my other social networking circles were kept up to date with my newest blog. Having been on LiveJournal for the last seven years, I didn’t want to abandon all the contacts I had made there, but I didn’t want to go through all the work of duplicating every post from my WordPress blog over to LiveJournal. Similarly, I’ve been on Twitter since shortly after its inception, and wanted to make sure that my new blog posts were broadcast to my Twitter audience as well.

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LiveJournal, being my larger audience, was my first priority. After some Googling and searching on the WordPress Plugin Directory, I finally came across the plainly named LiveJournal Crossposter. As a rule, I am wary of any plugin or application that hasn’t been updated in over a year. Status such as that rarely indicates that the plugin is “perfect just the way it is” and more often means its “abandoned, because I just don’t care to work on it anymore.” Never the less, it was the only option I could find short of setting up a bulky RSS feed that I would then have to force my LiveJournal friends to subscribe to, so I downloaded it and started setting it up. LiveJournal Crossposter appears under the Settings menu and has a nice feature set with a user friendly interface. Connecting it to your LiveJournal account is as easy as simply putting in your username and password. No confusing codes or authentication links. Additionally, you can set the plugin to post to a community if that is your preference. You can customize a marquee of sorts (as a header or footer) that will refer your LiveJournal readers back to your WordPress blog. There are a series of custom options that the plugin will configure for you, or alternately, you can create your own full custom marquee using a series of context tags and so forth.

Other options you can set are default privacy settings; how comments are handled (readers can either comment on the LiveJournal cross post or be forced back to your WordPress); tag transferral, how extended text is handled (either with an LJ cut, a link back to WordPress, or simply ignoring it and posting the whole entry); and filtering by WordPress Categories. All of these settings are simply to configure the default options and can be changed on the Create New Post dialogue within the WordPress dashboard.

The plugin is extraordinarily efficient and throws the new blog entry up to LiveJournal almost as fast as your WordPress updates. Even when you edit a post after publishing it, the LiveJournal mirror is immediately resubmitted. It is in the editing of entries, however, that I found the only issue. When you edit an entry, it physically removes the post from LiveJournal and uploads a new version. This will lose any comments you may have already received at the LiveJournal end. This can be avoided, however, by simply forcing your LiveJournal friends to post all their comments on your actual WordPress blog. Easy peasy.

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A reliable Twitter publisher was actually more difficult to find. Not because it was hard to find a plugin, but because there were so many it was hard to find a good one. I ran through two other Twitter plugins that either did nothing, or made a rampant mess of my twitters, before discovering the final, successful plugin. While some of the earlier options had more configuration settings and lots of variables, they weren’t worth the effort and usually failed to work anyway. I actually gave up on it for a couple of weeks and just used TwitterFeed, portaling an RSS feed from my blog to Twitter. It worked, but it was slow. It scrapes every 30 minutes and when it pushes your post, can often reinterpret the title or cut off text. I still use it for LiveJournal and Flickr, but if I could get away from it completely, I would. Which, in the end, is why I was so excited to finally come across Twitpress. Twitpress loads under the Manage tab and is about as simple a plugin as you’ll ever see. You simply put in your Twitter username and password to initiate the service. You can also customize the message format with a few defined variables listed on the page for you. Really, it doesn’t have to do much; but what it does do, it does well. There are no filters, limited options, and basic configuration. Its a straightforward service and it works perfectly, and quickly!

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The final plugin that I wanted to briefly mention, is one that’s actually in use here on BloggingAmigos, but isn’t featured in any of the previous entries. When I was reading the latest greatest from Chalupa, I noticed the ShareThis link and icon at the bottom of the post and was curious. I’ve seen a lot of different mechanics for Digging, Stumbling, or Del.Icious.ing content on the internet, but I hadn’t had the pleasure of the ShareThis experience. Feel free to scroll to the bottom of this entry and click on it to see what I’m talking about. What I like about ShareThis is that its compact, because I’ll admit, I love collapsible spaces in web pages. It takes up very little room on a page, and yet expands out to be very functional. From one plugin, users can share your content with several other social bookmarking sites; and with minimal effort.The system is very customizable as well. Starting at the ShareThis home page, you first create an account which will inevitably provide some nice tracking stats for your click-throughs. Once your account is created, you simply build your button in the ShareThis for Publishers section. The WordPress section has the download link for the plugin and the button configuration options, which allow you to choose what all social linking is included on your pop-out window. You also have limited ability to change the menu colors to better match your WordPress layout.

All of this customization generates a code that is then reciprocally inserted into the plugin management page, which is loaded under the Settings menu on your WordPress dashboard. Also, default adding options are managed in the settings page as well.

Once everything is set up and running, you will want to go back to the ShareThis site and log in to your My Account page and register your domain. It takes about 24 hours for your domain to be validated, but once it is, you can visit a reports page that shows how the ShareThis button has been used on your blog. Some nice, additional, usage tracking for your blog.

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I hope you find some of these plugins useful and use them to try and drive a little extra traffic to your blog. So enjoy, and be sure to let me know how they work out for you!

Statistics: Getting what you want

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 26, 2008
in Getting Started
. 0 Comments

Burger King knew what it was doing when it came up with the ad campaign, “Have it your way.” That’s all people really want; a burger that fits their needs, well, I guess with the exception of those who don’t eat hamburgers. Anyway, statistics plugins and packages are the same way. They won’t necessarily customize themselves for you, but there’s a wide enough variety of options that should allow you to have it your way.

Before you just grab something and install it, which is OK if you’re willing to do a lot of experimenting, you might want to do a little research first. What exactly do you want? Here are a few thing I would consider:

  • Cost - This seems like a no-brainer to me, but I always look for the free tools. Depending on your application though, you might want to find something “extra” professional.
  • Longevity - How long will your stats be available? Are only the last X hits available? Does your data accumulate for as long as you use it? In this case most people would prefer to see trends over time. Yes, it is nice to see what’s happened in the last 100 hits, but what if you receive 125 hits/day? You’ll never be able to compare your numbers to yesterday or last week or last month unless you manually keep track of your data. That would be a lot of work
  • Data Types - What kind of information are you getting? You should be able to track hits, time, browser, and referring links. Some packages will give you more information like pages visited, language, ISP, location of visitor, search engines, keywords, entrance pages, and exit pages. Do you really need all of that? Are you interested in some of that? Something to think about if you have to choose between a few.
  • Tying Data Together - It’s nice knowing where your hits came from, what referring links were clicked, and what pages were visited. It can also be nice to be able to track all of that information by a single visit.
  • Readability - Like everything else, how easy you can use a product can affect how often you use it and how happy you are. If your stats application has a lot of data but you can’t decipher any of it, you might want to find something else.

I know I don’t need to sing the praises of the great and powerful Oz, I mean Google. That just happens to be what I’m currently using for all of my Wordpress blogs. Google Analytics is free, it’s easy to setup, it lasts forever and I get a wide variety of data. I wouldn’t even begin to say that I understand all the ins and outs of it, but I’m learning. All you need is a Google/GMail account and you’re good to go. You can also share these stats with any other Google account. This can be handy if you personally have several accounts and want to see your stats from all logins, or if you have a joint blog with several friends/colleagues.

There is also a quick and easy Wordpress plugin called Google Analytics for Wordpress. After downloading and installing, you just need to tell it your account number. If you’d like to read more about this plugin I have a more extensive review here.

Google Analytics for Wordpress plugin

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 26, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins and Other Software for Bloggers
. 1 Comment

If you have already setup a Google Analytics account and now need to add your tracking code to your Wordpress site, I highly recommend using a plugin. A plugin for this task eliminates the hassle of having to copy and paste that code into your template. Plus, you will not have to repeat this task every time you switch templates.

Google Analytics for Wordpress is very easy to install and setup. After you download and upload the folder to your plugins folder, you’ll need to activate it from the Plugins menu in Wordpress. Your next step will be to copy/paste your account number from Google Analytics into your plugin’s configuration page. Your account number can be found by logging into Google Analytics, clicking on the edit link for your account and then clicking on the Check Status link. From here you’ll be able to pick two types of code to paste onto your site or blog. The account number is within the code in both pieces of code.

You’ll then paste this account number into the appropriate box in your Google Analytics configuration page located in a sub-menu of Plugins. Some other options you can check are Track outbound clicks & downloads, Track AdSense clicks, Track extra Search Engines, Track the administrator and integration with Urchin.

To check your stats, you’ll need to login to the Google Analytics page to do so. This is normal. This plugin doesn’t import any stats to your Wordpress Dashboard.

FeedBurner Part 1: Setup and Analyze your feed

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 18, 2008
in Getting Started
. 0 Comments

In my first post, I installed Wordpress, now what?, I mentioned FeedBurner as a good tool for RSS feeds. I haven’t used other RSS tools for Wordpress so let us know if you have any other suggestions. Besides being able to see statistics on your feed, FeedBurner also has some other nice features that are broken up into four categories: Analyze, Optimize, Monetize, and Publicize. As you can see by the post title, I’m going to be talking about the Analyze tab today.

For starters, setting up your feed is easy. First you’ll need to know the address for your auto-generated feed. Wordpress creates two: one for your posts and another for your comments. If I were you, I’d setup both because it’s not that hard and this way everything will be consistent. On your blog there should be links to your feeds. You can click on them to get the address or right-click and copy the address. Now that you have the address you can setup the feed at FeedBurner.com. On the homepage there’s an area to paste/type in the address for your feed. From here you hit the Next button and you’ll have a few more options. I’m not going to write about those because FeedBurner has excellent help for that kind of stuff. After you have things setup for your post feed you can then repeat for your comment feed.

Next time you’ll login to FeedBurner you’ll have a dashboard, called My Feeds, with your two new feeds showing up. Click on one of them and you’ll be under the Analyze tab. This is where you can view all of your statistics. You can view stats on your Feed, Site and Headline Animators. For your feed you can track item views, item link clicks, and item enclosure downloads. The last one is mostly for podcast episodes, which we’ll eventually get to. The feed stats are already setup, but it’ll take a little extra work for site stats, and headline animators can be configured under the Publicize tab.

Your feed stats will track subscribers, hits, item uses, and uncommon uses. A subscriber is defined as somebody checking your feed through a feed reader on a given day. If you have 20 subscribers on Monday and 15 on Tuesday, this doesn’t mean you have 35 total. This just means 20 people checked it on Monday and on Tuesday some of them had their computers off, didn’t open their reader, etc. You can look at your stats by yesterday, past 7 days, past 30 days and all time. You do get to see trends over time, but you’re not able to look at specific day more than a month back. This is a drawback, but hey, you’re using a free service.

If you already have a statistics tool setup or are going to set one up, you might not want to use FeedBurner’s service. You almost always get conflicting numbers for hits, unique hits, etc. This has to do with time zones and the different algorithms and criteria the software is programed to use. It can get confusing trying to work off of two different statistics tools.

After you look through some of the initial options and make your choices, you should start seeing some stats in the next day or two, if people are subscribed. One last thing you need to do to make sure people are using your FeedBurner feed and not your old feed. You could go to all the trouble of tracking down those links in your template, or you could use the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin.

I installed Wordpress, now what?

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 12, 2008
in Getting Started
. 2 Comments

So you’ve bought a domain name, installed your Wordpress blog, and now you’re wondering what to do. Well, look no further because I’m about to tell you the things you should be thinking about.

Whenever I play around with technology I usually do a little research, play around with it, and then jump in headfirst. Over the past few years of blogging, there are a few things I’ve learned that would have been better being setup from the very beginning.

#1 Statistics
“What’s that?” you say. “Stats? I hated that class!” Well, you won’t have to get out your calculator or calculate any r values. What we’re talking about here is finding out if people are coming to your blog, what posts are popular, what are people searching for to find your blog, what links were clicked to get to your blog, etc, etc.

Feeling a little bit better about this topic? I thought you would. I have tried out about 5-10 different stats packages, that are free, for blogging. They have all been a little bit different and offer some different types of information. One thing to point out is if you have multiple stats packages installed, you’re probably going to get different numbers for the amount of hits (both total and unique), referring links, time on site, etc. The reason for this is because it depends on how long it waits before counting a hit from the same IP as another unique hit. It also depends on the timezone it’s working off of, and many other technicalities. This is why I would suggest only using only one to avoid confusion.

One reason to set up your statistics immediately is that every day that goes by without a tool installed is another day you have no idea what kind of traffic your blog is seeing. I’m currently using Google Analytics and am really enjoying it. The biggest advantage to using this free tool is that you’re not limited to only seeing the most X recent hits. Most of the other free tools I’ve used have only allowed me to see the last 100 or 200 hits. This is great, but it cripples you from seeing any trends over time. The only thing I miss about Google Analytics is that even though I’m able to see a lot of different types of information, they aren’t sorted by specific hits. I can’t see that a particular person came to my site from a referring link, went to 8 pages, spent 3min on my site and then left. So you might want to consider what types of information you’re wanting to receive and how they’re sorted before picking a certain stats tool.

#2 RSS Feed
If you’re not familiar with what an RSS feed is, then you should look it up on Wikipedia or something. These aren’t so much the wave of the future, but the wave of the now. Almost every blog and website you go to will offer some type or types of RSS feeds to their users. These are then setup on RSS readers so somebody can see if new content has been posted without having to go visit their favorite site(s). This may not sound like a big deal if you check one or two sites a day, however, if 35 of your friends are infrequent bloggers and you’d like to keep up with all their blogs…that’s when an RSS reader starts to sound like a good idea.

Wordpress has automatic RSS generation features built right into it. The only drawback is you don’t get to choose how it looks or what’s included, you can’t see stats on who’s subscribed, etc. A good, free tool I’ve been using for all of my feeds is FeedBurner. FeedBurner was recently bought by Google so I don’t think there’s any danger of it disappearing any time soon. With this service you can add bells and whistles to your feed, customize it for podcasts, modify description and title, see how many people are subscribed, etc. There’s a lot of cool functionality which I will be discussing in a later post. There are also some very handy plugins that allow you to redirect your built-in Wordpress feed to use FeedBurner, which I will also be talking about in a later post.

#3 Ads
Advertisements are something I just started using and wish I had setup a long time ago. Some of my friends stay away from them because they see it as “whoring themselves out” or something that will “clutter up their site.’”This can very easily happen and is something to consider if and when choosing an ad service. I’ve been using Google Adsense for a few months now and highly recommend it. You’re able to choose the type, style and size of your ads. You’re able to blacklist specific ads from showing up. Most importantly, you’re also able to maybe make some money which could cover your domain name costs and maybe even your hosting costs.

#4 Spam
Spam is something I’m sure you seen in your mailbox. If you’re new to blogging, then you may not know that you can also get spam comments. Just like there are spam filters for mail, there are also spam filters for blog comments. Wordpress has some settings to help prevent this under Options…Discussion. You can prevent comments from showing immediately, blacklist people and even hold comments if they have too many links in them. This doesn’t always catch everything though.

One built-in plugin you’ll find is called Akismet. This is a pretty decent service that will try to catch some spam. The only catch is you have to have an API key to use it. You can easily get one of these free by creating an account at Wordpress.com. The only thing I don’t like about Akismet, and this might just be ignorance on my part, is that I’m not notified in any way if some suspected comments are being held for my approval. I have to login to my blog and check my Comments tab.

There are also many other free spam plugins you can check out and try. Always check out some of the specifications before you pick one. You’ll want to make sure you can manually “ok” a comment if it’s suspected of spam and that you’re able to manage the spam blocker/catcher in some way.

#5 Organization
I’m sure all of you have gotten tired of somebody telling you to clean up your room at some point in time. This is one of those things that may seem pointless to you and important to someone else at the exact same time. In the case of your blog, it’s good to consider your readers on this one because they’re the ones reading. If you’re creating a personal blog and don’t want anyone to read it, then maybe you can skip some organization. I would still recommend some categorizing or tagging of your posts regardless of what kind of readership you’re expecting.

There are two ways to organize your posts: categories and tags. The general rule of thumb is to use categorize for big and broad things and tags for more specific things. Both categories and tags make posts easier to find for you and your readers. It allows people to find more posts on similar topics or maybe continue reading the saga of a long and drawn-out story. The hard part is always deciding on your organization scheme. If you can figure this out beforehand, it’s usually less work. If you need to change things up later on, the amount of work really depends on how many posts you have to edit.

Another step in this organization process is to setup a plugin and/or widget to display your categories/tags for people to go directly to them. There are some built-in widgets to display categories and tags, but you might want to look for something specific once you start having a large amount of posts of varying types.

Wrapping it up
This pretty much covers what I consider to be the essentials. There are many, many other plugins and add-ons out there just begging you to play with them. Your template/theme is an aspect I didn’t mention. One reason is you can easily use one of the provided themes to get started. Another reason is this isn’t my area of expertise. Tara will be giving some advice and tips about these in the near future. If you have any questions or comments let us know.