Update 08/08/2010: Improved the link handling & now tracks the post URL in Analytics.

Reading SEOmoz’s blog on the way home from work, I noticed a great little call to action at the bottom of their post that read:

“Did you like this post? Yes / No“

I like this idea of tracking visitor sentiment towards posts, but I think SEOmoz’s version isn’t quite as actionable as it could be. I mean, sure you can see whether or not people liked the blog post from the blog itself, but what if you wanted to delve a little deeper? What if you want to see post ratings aggregated and filtered based on geography, visitor type, conversions, traffic sources, custom variables etc? That could be REALLY powerful - you could find out which posts work for which countries, which posts your visitors didn’t like - so you could improve on it - and so much more actionable stuff like that. Read more →

So, you’ve started to track clicks on your RSS subscribe button and now you want to measure what your RSS subscribers and Twitter followers are doing on your site. Thankfully, it’s very easy to do. You’re going to need the following things:

• A blog
• Google Analytics installed
• RSS subscribers (optional, but recommended :P)
• A Twitter account with followers (optional, but highly recommended) - yes, you can track your link to Twitter too!

Here’s what you need to do:

Read more →

What are people copying from your website and sharing with their friends? Can you get links from this? Introducing Tynt…

Tynt, is a new web service which aims to be the Analytics company for copy/paste on your site. You can track what is copied (words, images), where on your site it was copied from and even help you to get links back from the content!

The Results

I’ve installed it on my blog here and with a few days of data, I’m starting to see what is getting copied: Read more →

Comments are really important to track, if you want to create a successful blog, for a number of reasons:

• Comments create community
• They add fresh, new content for search engines to crawl
• Comments give you feedback

Tracking comments in Google Analytics lets you see what drives people to comment on your blog. Read more →

When starting out with blogging it may be intimidating to use Google Analytics or where to begin. Anyway, here are 5 key tips I recommend focusing on, to write a succesful blog:

1. Setup goals & funnels

Goals will help you to track your progress, against blogging-specific metrics (assuming you want to earn a buck, rank higher or get more exposure)… Here’s how to set them up:

• Track clicks on your RSS subscribe button
• Track submissions on your contact form
• Track comments on your posts

Read more →

Subscribers mean extra readership - and quite often, extra revenue. Therefore, it makes sense to track them, so you can measure your progress relative to your effort. Here’s a simple way to track visitors who click on your RSS feed link on your page. Read more →

Assumptions can be dangerous, especially when making important decisions off assumptions. The more you make, the more convoluted and abstract the truth becomes. Here are a few you might like to become aware of: Read more →