Magic MarketBuying and selling in the marketplace of ideas

I’m going to try using the “What Would Seth Godin Do” Wordpess plugin: it greets brand-new users with a special message. In this case, it’ll be an introduction and a reminder to subscribe. Currently, readership of the site is pretty low, including RSS, so I’ll be interested to see if this has an impact. Couldn’t hurt, right?

Right?

I’ve been asked to stick Google Analytics code into a Tumblelog. This is a good learning opportunity. For example, I have now learned that the proper term for a Tumblr blog is Tumblelog, which I always kind of suspected but wanted to be untrue because I like the word Tumblog better. Oh well, too bad.

This assignment is a bit complicated! The Tumblr is a companion to another website that already exists, so I’m not 100% sure of the Best way to roll the Tumblr stats into the pre-existing domain’s stats. So I’ve done some investigating.

Most of the advice about Analytics and Tumblr is for tracking only Tumblr traffic. That’s nice, and we could make that work for our purposes if we had to. But it would be nice if there was a way to track the Tumblr traffic in a way that is aware of the existing website.

As it turns out, that is possible to do. Thirty Day Challenge has a (slightly out-of-date) video that describes the process. You have to create a new profile in your Analytics account. Okay! Let’s do that.

So! Just create a new profile. I chose “for an existing domain,” since Google helpfully informed me “invalid entry” when I chose “new domain.” This means that after I created the Profile, I had to edit it to have the Tumblr URL instead of the URL of the existing domain. Update! Nope, I did it wrong the first time. You need to create it for a new domain, not an existing one, because if you do it for an existing domain then your UA number will be the same and Analytics won’t be able to tell your Tumblr apart from some other site. I don’t know why I got the “invalid entry” error last time I tried, but I just re-attempted and it worked fine.

One other confusing part: when you’re creating a new profile, there’s a checkbox that says “Apply cost data.” WHAT DOES THAT MEAN. The help is no help at all. As it turns out, “cost data” is just information from an Adwords account. So if you’ve been buying Adwords, you can have that data included in your Tumblr analytics. I only think that would be useful if you’re buying Adwords to promote your Tumblelog, but hey you might as well apply it anyway, since it can’t hurt.

And then you just grab the code, drop it into the HTML of the Tumblelog’s description, and hey presto you’re done.

Man oh man, I wish it was just Tumblog. Typing that extra le in there is like a tongue-twister for my fingers.

Update! Discovered one additional catch: putting the Analytics code in your Tumblr Description will hide it from regular human visitors, but robots will think that it’s important metadata. Facebook in particular is a problem — if someone attaches a link to the page, the description will contain all of the javascript. The solution: put the Analytics code in the HTML of your template. This means that any time you update your theme, you’ll need to re-insert your tracking code, which is a bit of a hassle. But so is life! Ah, life.

Another Update! Yacht spammer, please stop trying to comment.