A while back Rand and Scott put together a Whiteboard Friday on setting up some extra Java Script to track non-traditional conversions and goals. At the time my brother and I were about 5 months into creating a new analytics tool that does this for you so you don’t have to know how to create special java script and also so you can view it all with your stats and have it compiled with everything else you are already tracking. Well, 7 months and endless hours later we are ready and have launched our new analytics program, called BLVD Status.
I am not going to make this post a promotion for you to go sign up for my new product. Instead, I will outline some things that we feel can genuinely help your site and your marketing efforts. It is a live stats offer similar to Have a Mint, with extras such as conversions and in depth reporting. It is very simple to set up and use. Our goal was to make something easy enough that a mom could install it on her blog but with enough data that a business professional could benefit from it as well. We just created a Wordpress plugin to make it even easier to install on Wordpress blogs as well.
RSS Feed Subscriber Conversions
After signing up you can set up conversions for pretty much anything on your site: RSS Feed Subscribers, Newsletters, Email RSS Subscribers, outgoing links, etc. You just need the URL you want to track, and there is a section where you can insert it and identify it with an Icon. The Dashboard section shows where you can see the conversions, what type of conversion it is, what time it happened along with how long it took to convert, and the referrer that led to the conversion.
You can click on the In-Depth Tab to segment conversions out by referrers, keywords, and get more data like IP locations and just about everything else. The above screenshot is an edited snapshot, so you can’t see all my data 🙂 but we get really good RSS Feed Subscriber conversions from our rank for “SEO blog,” and we would have had no way of knowing that prior to this.
Live Keyword Stats
Live keyword tracking is definitely the Made by SEO’s for SEO’s section that allows you to see the keywords that are bringing visits either in all time or recent, then it will show you the rank of the word right next to it and what engine it came from. You can segment the words by average rank or current rank, and you can segment what engine it shows the data from. Again, there is also an in-depth tab that will further open up keywords and show you IP info, averages, and pretty much any pertinent information regarding keywords.
There are more sections as well, such as Referrers, Foot Traffic, Site URLS, and Outgoing Links.
Some Other Cool Features
You can segment out each URL and see what keywords or referrals drive traffic to only that URL, what conversions came from that page, and what are the most common outgoing links for just that page. This is really cool for blog posts, as it will give you an entire overview of each post one URL at a time.
Another really cool feature for social media marketers is it allows you to set up tracking on the Digg This Button, so for every person that diggs your page from your button it will show you the referral info. If you are getting a ton of traffic from Reddit and StumbleUpon while trying to promote yourself on Digg, you can see if Reddit is bringing more Diggs than StumbleUpon or visa versa. BTW, Reddit usually brings more Diggs then StumbleUpon in our experience. We will be releasing case studies on this shortly on the BLVD Status Blog.
We will also be making this sort of tracking available for nearly any social site button, Sphinn included.
So there you have it. I wanted to share this with you as it is currently 100% free with no limits as to traffic, etc. Every site, whether it is a mom and pop, a mommy blogger, or a business professional, deserves to know what is going on, how it is going on, and when it is going on with their site.
Also, we have taken the “for the people, by the people” approach, so any and all suggestions are welcome. If your suggestions can help a site owner better understand his or her business, we will probably implement it. Some things to come are ranking reports that will show you your rank, visits, and conversions for each keyword. Also, the social button tracking, plus we are looking into a mobile app so you can track all your stats on your cell phone live.
Please send any and all problems or recommendations to
