I find metrics and business intelligence to be extremely telling and cannot live without them. The ability to test, optimize, re-test and ultimately obtain the desired action of a user or customer at the best possible price is something only afforded to online advertising and marketing as long as you use the right tools.

I am sure you have heard of conversion tracking, and Google’s tools within AdWords and Analytics make it very easy. Here is my guide to setting up, finding the data, and understanding the differences between Google AdWords Conversions and Google Analytics Goals and Filters.

First Setup Google AdWords to talk to Google Analytics

Be sure to tie your Google AdWords account to your Google Analytics account. To do so you need to have the email that you use as your AdWords login the same as an email of a user of your Google Analytics. Once you have an email that is the same for both AdWords and Analytics you login to your Google Adwords account. On the top menu click the Analytics tab (see graphic below).

The Analytics account will be listed as long as your Analytics has a user with the same email as your AdWords account. Follow the steps and you will then see your Analytics reports available via the “Analytics” tab within Google AdWords.

How to Setup Conversion Tracking within Google AdWords

To set up the conversion tracking within Google AdWords click on the “Conversion Tracking” submenu underneath the “Campaign Management” tab.

You then “Create a New Action” and you need to name it, such as “Registrations”, other data can be associated to it also. Once you save the action you will be given code to put on the page.

You copy the code and paste it into the page that the user will see after they take your desired action. For example if you have a registration page named “register.php” and it collects their name and email with a button to “register” and the next page once registered is “welcome.php” then you put the code on the “welcome.php” page.

Example of how the flow of data works with AdWords: an individual searches on your keyword within Google, the Google network, or Content Network (depending on how you set up your AdWords campaign) then they see one of your advertisements (you can create many different variations) and go to your landing page, submit the information to register with you, then the next page which has the Conversion Tracking code is presented to the user “Thanks for Registering” and the code pings Google AdWords to register a conversion.

You will now see which Campaign, AdGroup, Keyword and Advertisement within Google AdWords generated that conversion. Cost per conversion and other useful information is provided as well.

How to Setup Conversion Tracking within Google Analytics

To set up the conversion tracking with Google Analytics you create what they call “Goals”. To set up a goal you first look under the “Website Profiles” and next to your Domain you will see the “View Reports” and “Edit” under “Settings”.

You will see under the “Conversion Goals and Funnel” heading a list of Goal Names, starting with sequential numbering of G1 G2 G3 etc. Click the “Edit” link under settings to set up a Goal.

Note: What is different about the Google Analytic Goal tracking code as opposed to Google AdWords Conversion Tracking is that you do not need to set up code on your pages for the Goal Tracking. However, you must have the generic Google Analytics code on all your pages for it to work.

There are a list of fields to fill out, the question marks provide information on what is needed. Two main items to understand, Goals and Funnels. Goals are set up by simply putting the URL of the page that as the Goal page. Every visit to that page will be counted so you need to be careful and assure that is a unique page that can only be accessed the way you want. For example if the Goal page is your home page because a new registrant is taken to the home page after registering you will not only have the total of new registrants but it will also show the total number of visits to the home page for that day. The total will be inflated. This is the major difference between the accuracy of the AdWords Conversion tracking and the Google Analytics Goal tracking. However, the Funnels, which are optional, assist in removing the inflated Goal counts.

To utilize Filters, which are incredibly helpful and powerful, you define the path you would like to see a person take. In other words your Goal may show 10 registrants, however you may want to know if they went to the Goal page by first going to the registration page as this would remove all the inflated visitors. For example, if the Goal shows 20 visits to the Goal page and only 10 came from the registration page then you know there were 10 registrants. Utilizing filters can be used for many purposes.

Here are two powerful uses of the Goals and Filters, for internal site development and optimization as well as external advertising campaign testing.

First, internally you can use the filters to show the paths that are taken to registration. Is it home page –> registration or content page –> registration, any path you may suspect or see within Analytics you can filter here.

Also, internally if you have a multi-page sign up process you can determine exactly which pages potential registrants drop off. You may have individuals drop off when you ask certain questions or on certain pages, great to be able to test.

Second, to monitor external advertising campaigns that use unique landing pages you create, you can show filtering from page1 –> registration or page2 –> registration etc. This is a great way to determine, in a process of pages, which campaigns work best.

Where to Find the AdWords Conversions within Google AdWords

You can also find the AdWords conversion data within AdWords. Total number of Conversions are listed by Campaign Name, by Ad Group Name within the Campaign, by Advertisement Variation and by Keywords. The data will always be listed under the “Conversions” column.

Where to Find the AdWords Conversions and Goals within Google Analytics

Before we discuss how to use the Goal and Conversions, here is where you find the data with Google Analytics. The image on the left shows the data for AdWords is found under the “Traffic Sources” menu item. While the image on the right shows the Goals information is shown under the “Goals” tab, a lot of great information.

Now You’re Ready!
That’s it, now you are up and running and know the differences between the Google Conversion tracking with AdWords and the Google Analytics Goals and Funnels. The above is meant to get you started, however does not even begin to touch on the various ways in which you can use the data. Begin to use the tools, use your imagination and you will be wondering why you never used them before.

What is Reddit?
Reddit is a social news site, and bookmarking site, that users can post links to web pages and everyone can vote the articles up or down. (Wikipedia on Reddit). You can join quickly and add bookmarklets to your browser. Once you find a site or article you would like to share you simply click a button in your browser to vote it up / down or save it.

What Does it Look Like?
You will see Reddit buttons on articles like these:

The first thing you will see, before anyone submits is that the Reddit graphic prompts a user to submit this link: , once it is submitted the balance of positive votes vs. negative votes is displayed.

How Can Reddit Help Me?
Many users, myself included, find it a great way to locate content since the top stories, those that have been voted the highest, have already been filtered by thousands of people.

As a blogger and content publisher you can reach a greater audience with your content by having it submitted to sites like Reddit. You can submit the story yourself or let another submit it for you. Once submitted as individuals read your article on your site they can vote it up and more people will find your article via Reddit. Reddit can be a great way to find a broader audience and visitors to your site. An excellent reward for well written/informative content.

Another bonus is that you have additional links in to your site from Reddit and to your article. Also as others find you they may comment and/or link to you. Considering all you have to do is add a simple piece of code to each article, the benefits definitely outweigh the effort.

How to Add The Reddit Voting

Manually. To add the code manually take a look at the Reddit button page which as the three buttons above and code to cut and paste. Simply insert the title of your article and the URL to your article and your done.

Automatically. If you use WordPress, my favorite WordPress plugin is called reddZ-Et and found here at WordPress.org. Simply follow the instructions and the Reddit button, of your choice, will be automatically placed on every article for you.

This is one of many plugins and social bookmarking/news tools to help broaden your reach. Enjoy!

Google Blog Search allows anyone to search blogs and only blogs. Just as you would want your site to be listed in Google search you also want to be listed in Google blog search.

Manual Ping
The quick and easy way to assure you are indexed in the Google blog search is to manually enter your sites URL, what they call a ping by going here and simply pasting your sites feed address. A feed address may appear as “yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml”, “yoursite.com/wp-rss.php” or “feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedname”. Enter your feed and submit. While this is easy it would be ideal to alert Google and others automatically every time your feed is updated.

Automatic Ping
WordPress and others have this set up already, recent versions of WordPress already have the Google blog search set to be pinged. However if you are using an older version of WordPress and do not wish to upgrade or have another content management system that has an XML-RPC client then check to make sure it is set up. In WordPress you navigate to the settings –> writing or in older versions options –> writing, there you will find the Update Services section, check to see if this is listed http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 and if so you are fine otherwise paste it in and save changes. If however you have a rest client the URL is http://blogsearch.google.com/ping.

More detail can be found on the Google Blog Search Pinging Service API page and Frequently Asked Questions about Google blog search.

Here are my Top 10 WordPress plugins if I were to start a new WordPress blog (and I do often) here are the plugins I would immediately upload and activate before all else.

Search Engines & Optimization
Your site needs to be listed in search engines and optimized to be found.

• 1. Google XML Sitemaps : A sitemap will be generated for you and will work with Google, Google is the largest of all the search engines so you need to be indexed properly before you can be found.
• 2. All in One SEO Pack : Once your pages are indexed in Google, and other search engines, you need to be sure to have Title, Description, and Keywords for your site. Just as important is the ability to easily change the Title, Description, and Keywords for every post you make as the topic and discussion is different it is best to have the Title, Description and Keywords match the content. This plugin provides all that and more as you can modify the above when you post or write a page.

Visitor Retention
Make sure your visitors continue to receive your stories after they visited your site and hopefully return.

• 3. Add to Any Subscribe Button : Make it simple for visitors to easily add your feed to their favorite reader and receive your posts, hopefully returning as well.

Visitor Acquisition - Virally
Once you have visitors, the best reference is a friend so have your visitors tell others through services such as Digg and other social bookmarking/sharing services. You cannot beat referrals, they are strong and free.

• 4. diggZ-Et : Adds a Digg button to every post, a simple click and submit from a visitor and you are referenced in Digg, finding a new audience and traffic.
• 5. Add to Any : Share/Save/Bookmark Button or Sociable : As there are many different sharing and social bookmarking services, you want to easily be able to offer the visitors preferred provider, such as Reddit Del.icio.us and others, with a click of a button. These two, pick your preference, provide them all.

No Spam
Comment spam is no fun when you get 100 a day, bots typically spam your site by leaving comments and it is best to block them or make them more easily identifiable then to allow them all and clean it up yourself.

• 6. Akismet : An excellent tool for blocking and highlighting spam comments for you.
• 7. reCAPTCHA : Stop bots from leaving comments by providing a confirmation code that can only be read by human eyes, I am sure you have see the word on a background which is difficult but possible to decifer.

Track Progress
Statistics help you to determine the traffic from your site, where they come from and where they go.

• 8.Google Analytics for WordPress : Google Analytics is a free, and very impressive, statistics package. Easily add the tracking code to your pages with this plugin and track your progress.

Administrative
Here are some plugins to make the administration of your blog easier.

• 9. Wordpress Automatic Upgrade : Every now and then you need to upgrade Wordpress to the latest version, with this plugin you can do so by clicking to upgrade and it is taken care of for you, even backing up your site before the upgrade.
• 10. WP Super Cache : Just in case you site becomes popular, or even on the more reasonably priced web hosting plans they may turn off your site if too much traffic comes and your site is putting too much of a load on the web server, with this plugin a static page is rendered and served up thereby saving server load.

These are incredibly easy to install, just download from the link above, unzip, upload to your /wp-content/plugins directory the entire plugin folder and activate from your plugin menu option within the WordPress admin.

Hope these help, and let me know if you have others you would prefer in your top 10.

I found this Google Website Optimizer presentation that was created by Google. Basically a slide show with audio as well. Good introductory overview.

Post Ratings is a plugin to allow your users to rate all or a select number of your posts, stars or thumbs-up/down. Easy to install and free, instructions here. Try it on this post please, let’s see how well it works.

If you are using WordPress and your traffic increases, you may need to use a caching plugin to lower your CPU load or your webhost will make you upgrade your account to a more expensive server. Here is a great free cache plugin called SuperCache.

This free peel script is easy to install and easy to use. It is also referred to as a page peel, the upper right of the page looks like it is peeled back to attract visitors attention. A small peeled back image can reveal a portion of a larger image or text such as “look here” and once moused over it peels the page back to reveal a larger image. The larger image has a URL associated with it. Most peel script creators charge a fee, but this one is free.

Here is an image showing the smaller peel in the corner of the page.

I found the script here at this Flash and Actionscript Developer Site. The author has done a great job, makes changes, and keeps the versions fresh. They have also created easy to use instructions.I followed the instructions and found them easy to understand and simple to use. You can view it in action at this online meeting focused site. You will create two images, the smaller pre-peeled image and the larger post-peel image, change a couple variables in one file, cut and paste code into your site and upload the files to your site. Sounds like a lot but every new feature would require at least this much, minus the image creation.

This particular script has many variables that are customizable such as placing Place it on the left or right upper corner, speed of the peel once moused over, reflection on the peeled page, and more.

When I first began this site to monitor my online marketing progress I sat back to determine what metrics I should use to monitor progress. My first thoughts were about 50% right and 50% wrong. There are many statistics available for websites, however not all of them are relevant. Whether or not a statistic makes any sense for you depends on what your goal is.

As my site was new I thought it would be important to monitor site traffic, unique visitors, page views and other typical metrics. While these are valuable and can be used in many ways, such as encouraging advertisers to advertise, they alone are not metrics from which I can make decisions that will impact my main goal.

Determine Your Main Goal
Before you determine which metrics to utilize when monitoring your success and to make decisions from, you must first determine your goal. A site may offer a paid newsletter subscription, their goal would be to obtain new paid users. There are various steps in the process from a first time visitor through the final action of subscribing to a newsletter. In the case of this site the main goal is revenue. Simply tracking traffic to the site is not enough. Therefore should I really of cared about Alexa, Quantcast and Compete?

Alexa, Quantcast and Compete Do Not Matter
In the case of these tracking sites they track overall traffic but that is not the goal of this site. Having third party numbers showing that this site is visited more or less than another is not helpful. Alexa, Quantcast, and Compete have their uses. Alexa Rankings recently changed and Quantcast actually allows you to add code to your pages to add additional information to their statistics about your site. Why would you use them? Mainly to have a third party validate the web traffic to your site and Quantcast also provides information such as demographics about your site visitors. Useful for some purposes but not for this site.

Revenue Metrics
What matters in the case of this site is the ultimate goal of revenue and which metrics assist in determining how to optimize the revenue. If 100,000 people visit my site in one day and I do not generate revenue it does not matter if another 100,000 come the next day, so my Alexa ranking may be high but increasing my Alexa ranking through non converting traffic does me no good. Determining where my visitors come from, such as keywords in a search engine, what they do when they are here, and whether they ultimately end up increasing revenue for this site are the only metrics that matter.

Suggestion
I strongly suggest adding the Google Analytics code to your site. The information they gather is only accessible to you, a free statistics package from Google, and the information is invaluable. You cannot beat this free statistics package and you can better track the metrics that matter to your site.

In-Text advertising is what Kontera is known for. You can make more money per page using their system and installing their code. Install once and generate revenue forever.

How Kontera Works
You place their code on your pages and Kontera will hyperlink, in other words make links on your pages clickable by visitors, to advertisers sites. For example, if you have the word baskets within a post on a page of yours they may make that link clickable because an advertiser paid to receive clicks on the word baskets.

How You Make Money With Kontera
When a visitor is on a page of yours and a word is hyperlinked by Kontera that catches the visitors attention they can place the mouse over the word. When they move over the word an advertisement pops up enticing them to click and learn more. The visitor, if they click, is taken to the advertisers site that bid on that keyword. Since the link is clicked the advertiser pays Kontera and Kontera splits the revenue with you. What is nice about this advertising is that you do not need to do anything and the advertisement is nothing more than a hyperlink of a word that is already in one of your articles and does not appear as additional advertising. This raises your page eCPM.

New Feature to Make You More Money
The more clicks, the more money you make. Kontera has added a new feature to make individuals more likely to click and there is nothing changed on your page. The information that is shown when someone moves the mouse cursor over the hyperlinked word is enhanced, call it a rich media experience if you will. Take a look at this image from Kontera of their newest feature:

The benefit is hopefully more clicks per page and more money for you per page and per visitor.