Imagine if you could monitor every time someone copies and pastes something off your site. To make it even better, what if you can insert a backlink when you text is pasted somewhere else. It’s a great way for attribution, tracking what content is popular, and gaining some inbound links.
There is a service called Tynt Insight that allows you to do this. It’s a free service and there is even a slick reporting dashboard. You simply signup, generate your unique bit of JavaScript and insert it into your site.
Google Analytics is hands down one of the most popular free analytics platforms. It is used by large sites as well as personal blogs.
There is a ton of information provided in the reports that Google Analytics generates and since the reports are customizable you can slice and dice the information any way you see fit.
Google Analytics helps you identify where visitors are coming from, how long they stay on your site, which products are selling, which keywords lead to the highest conversion rates, which pages are most popular, and so on. I will have plenty of posts in the future discussing Google Analytics (including some advanced tweaks), but in this post I’d like to discuss the ”Traffic Sources” sources portion in Google Analytics. In particular, how to include information into your URLs to help you and Google Analytics identify a source of traffic.
