the goose

While I’m not really in the habit of quoting management gurus, Tom Peters had it right.  Measuring stuff works.  By measuring you focus your attention on whatever it is and that extra attention naturally means you spend more time thinking about achieving the objective.  “How much money did we make this week?”.  “How many leads converted to sales?”.  “What drove traffic to the site this week?”.  It is the last question that I’ve been tinkering with in particular.  We know that blogging helps our stats and get people into our sales pipeline.  We track manually the number of blogs we write each week but I’m trying to get as much of our data into Google Analytics as possible.

I hunted around and couldn’t find what I was looking for so I put togther this wordpress plugin.  Once installed you can enter your GA tracking code under the Settings menu.  The script tracks every time you publish or edit a blog along with a couple of other events.  These events show up under the ‘Events’ tab in the analytics interface.  You can customise your dashboard report to include these metrics so you can easily see what when you blogged and what impact (if any) it had on traffic.

Ideally I’d like to add extra metrics such as ‘outbound phone calls’, ‘inbound phone calls’, ‘tweets’ and all the other stuff we track manually.  I think there is a lot of scope for pimping out analytics with this type of extra information.  While it is easy to know that you blogged last Wednesday  – having a record there permenantly helps to identify trends over time.

Right.  Enough of all this coding business.  Time for some real work …