Schedule Statistics Reports By Email

If you have a free Google Analytics account linked to your website you can navigate to any section of your statistics,  then schedule a report to be emailed to you/someone else every week/month/day.

The sort of reports you might benefit from seeing regularly are:

• Weekly Summary (the first page you see when you click on View Reports)
• Most popular posts by title (look under Content tab, then Content by title)
• Posts by a certain author (go to Content by title, then add author’s name to the filter box)
• New subscribers to your newsletter (first setup a goal with your subscribe page url, click on Goals)

Email Yourself a Weekly Summary

1. Login to your Google Analytics account.
2. Click on View Reports beside your website address
3. Click on the grey Email button at the top of the page
4. Fill in boxes to send report immediately or click the Schedule tab
5. Enter additional email addresses ro recieve the report or leave as send to me
6. Add a subject (tip: setup a mail rule to put these emails into a Stats folder under your inbox)
7. Add Description (mostly useful if emailing to others or if you are creating lots of reports)
8. Choose format (pdf is easy but excel compatible formats mean you can keep all stats in a spreadsheet)
9. Choose how often you would like to receive your report
10. Tick Comparison box to include a comparison of previous month/week.
11. Click Schedule button.

Email Report Showing New Subscribers to Your Newsletter

This is really useful if you use the Post Notification plugin to send an email newsletter from your WordPress website as it doesn’t notifiy you of new subscribers. I really like comparison feature on this one too so you can see which of your new content is enticing more subscribers. [Read more]

Stop Google Maps Disappearing

If you’ve got a website, chances are you have a Google map displaying somewhere on your site showing your location or the locations of the places you blog about. Static maps which don’t allow you to zoom in or move around, are a thing of the past. If your location is spectacular, why wouldn’t you want website visitors to be able to click on Satellite View and see the beach, sea and surf for real.

WordPress and Google Maps

When you copy the embed code for a Google map and paste into the html view of a WordPress post or page, it appears to work as it should until you try and edit the page. When you make changes to your page, the map disappears and you have to go back to Google, get the embed code and paste all over again. Very annoying and time-consuming.

The Plugin to Solve Your Problems

As you probably suspected and I have recently discovered, there is a plugin called XML Google Maps Plugin which solves this problem and it’s not complicated to use. (See screenshots below)

First you need a maps API key.

1. Go to Google Maps API Sign up Page
2. Sign in to your Google Account
3. Enter the website address where the maps will be displaying (if your WordPress blog is in a separate folder,include this in the address, otherwise just type your website address)
4. Tick that you have read terms and conditions
5. Click on the Generate API Key button at the bottom
6. Paste the key into a blank file on your computer and logout (you will need this key later)

Next you need the XML Maps Plugin on your website.

1. Download the XML Google Maps plugin and upload to your plugins folder using ftp.
2. OR if you are using one of the latest versions of WordPress, go to plugins on your admin bar, click Upload New, find the right plugin and upload it directly into your plugins folder.
3. Activate the plugin in your plugins admin. [Read more]

Google Translates Your Website

It is now possible to display your website in almost any language simply by pasting a snippet of Google Translate code into your website or blog. Your website visitors select their language from the dropdown list in the Google Translate box and all text on the page they are looking at is translated immediately. [Read more]

Register a Sitemap with Google

A sitemap is like a Table of Contents for your website except instead of flipping pages to get to the page listed, you just click and you’re there. Sitemaps list all pages on your website and are a great way to help your customers find your information quickly and easily. [Read more]

Google Analytics and WordPress

Most website hosting packages offer some sort of statistical reports on your website traffic; how many visits you get a day, which pages do visitors look at the most, what country are they from etc. The few people who do actually check their stats don’t tend to use them for much more than a quick confirmation that visitor numbers are increasing. [Read more]

Google Launches Intuitive Internet Browser

Google Chrome is the new internet browser from Google which you can download from the Google homepage. You use it instead of Internet Explorer for everything internet related.

[Read more]

Google Calendar for Online Events

You can create a free calendar at www.google.com/calendar containing events or daily updates of your choosing. Once your calendar is setup, you can display it on your website or blog for everyone to see. By making the calendar public, you also include your calendar on Google’s public events search. [Read more]