I just found out MC Hammer is quite the web entrepreneur, and he has a startup called Dance Jam. He is living and speaking in Silicon Valley at events and after I saw this video of him professing his love for analytics analytics, I couldn’t help but get stoked for the man.
Maybe we should send him an invite to try BLVD Status?
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We are trying to keep BLVD Status FREE as long as possible. In order to accomplish this, we need our users to share the love, and tell people about it. A great way is to put this badge on your website:
To do so, simply copy this code, and put it on your website.
<a href=”http://www.blvdstatus.com”><img src=”http://www.blvdstatus.com/badge.png” width=”130″ height=”98″ /></a>
We created a plugin to make it easier for bloggers using Wordpress to add the tracking script to every page in their blog, rather than having to modify any template files.
Simply download the BLVD Status Wordpress Plugin.
After downloading it, extract the zip file. Upload the “blvd-status.php” file to your “/plugins” directory in Wordpress. Then, activate it via the Admin Plugins page. As long as the plugin is activated, the tracking script will be added to your blog. Make sure you have an account with us first, before trying to get it to work.
FEATURES for v 1.0:
- Detects whether your page is SSL or not, and prints the correct code
- Simple installation (no configuration).
I am planning on continually adding to this plugin. My next idea is creating some options, like a contact form that will help you set up the form as a conversion campaign. I would also like to add something to help with RSS feed tracking. For now, this will do. Let us know if you have any problems installing it.
This is a basic guide of setting up conversions in BLVD Status. Basically, we define a “conversion” when a visitor on your website moves from being just a normal visitor, into a customer. So basically, if the goal of your website is to drive people to fill out a contact form, buy a product, or subscribe to your RSS feed, when a user makes that commitment, they convert.
Within conversions, we talk about “campaigns”. A campaign can be thought of as one conversion. So if you did have a contact form, a sales form, and an RSS feed on your website, and your goal was to track which users do each one, then you would want to create a seperate campaign for each one.
Setting up conversions is really easy. We didn’t want our users to have to modify their code, or learn HTML like some other analytics companies make you do. So, you can have complete control over your campaigns within your BLVD Status account login. If you don’t have an account yet, you will need one. Sign up for free.
I am going to use our stats, and one of our campaigns as an example of how to set campaigns up, and to show you how you can understand the data. We wanted to track how many people signed up for a BETA account, and where they came from. This would allow us to see how users are finding us, which pages they view befor signing up, and how long it takes.
So first off, when you login to your dash board, click on the “Conversions” icon. 
Next, click the “Add a new campaign” text link.
You will then come to a page that looks like this:
The next step is to fill out the form. First fill in the “Campaign Name”. This is completely up to you, and is for your reference. In my example, I wanted to set up a campaign to identify people signing up for BETA accounts. So, for the name I put “BETA Signup”.
Now, you can select an icon as an identifier. Basically, there are a few places within the analytics reporting that show conversions (I will show this in a bit). So, it’s good to choose an icon that is identifiable with your campaign. For this one, I chose the icon of the person, since this campaign has to do with users or people. So whenever I see that icon in my reporting, I know it was part of a BETA sign up. And don’t worry, yes, there are more icons to come.
The next part is telling BLVD the url you would like the campaign to relate to. This is where it gets a little tricky, but not by much. For most users, you can leave it on the tab “Simple URL Trigger”. You then want to identify the URL you would like to track. For my example, I wanted to track how many people land on the BETA signup confirmation page. I know that people wouldn’t get to that page unless they filled out the form to create an account. So, for the URL I put that page in.
The next part is to decide how it should be tracked. So, you need to select an option from the “Situation” drop down menu. Let me explain each option:
The visitor was referred by the specified URL:
Let’s assume you are running a banner ad on another website that links your website, and you would like to track how many people click it. Better yet, you would like to see how many people click it, and then how long they visit your website, which pages they view etc… Let’s assume I had a banner going on a website like mashable. I could put “http://www.mashable.com” as the URL, and then select this option in the situation menu. Then, whenever someone clicks on my banner on their website, it would show up as a conversion in BLVD Status.
The visitor arrives at the specified URL:
This was the option I needed to use for BETA signups. I knew that since no one would come to the confirmation URL UNLESS they signed up, it would track pretty accurately how many signups we received. This is the option you would most likely select if you are tracking contact forms, ecommerce checkout confirmations etc…
The visitor leaves a page to visit the specified URL:
This is one of my personal favorites, as it allows you to track RSS feeds. We have our feed through feedburner. For the URL I would put our feed url from feedburner, and then select this option. That way, whenever someone from my site clicks on our RSS feed link, it will show up as a conversion. If you are starting to think creatively, you are probably thinking of other options as well for this. Maybe like setting up a campaign for the banner ads you run, so that you can send a report to the banner owner? Or, tracking clicks to an affiliate site to make sure your stats match up with their payout? Anyways, this is very useful.
So here is what my page looked like after filling in the correct options:
After you are done filling it out, click “Create Campaign” to save the campaign. It will then take you to a page that lists all of your campaigns. To start tracking the one you just created, make sure to click on the “Activate” icon next to the campaign name. You can activate/deactivate campaigns for tracking at any time on this page. Currently, we only allow you to delete a campaign if there hasn’t been any data supplied.
Quick note about the “Parameterized URL Trigger” tab (Advanced Users):
Most users won’t need to use this, but this option is for URL you want to track that aren’t constant. For example, if you are sending form data through your server using “GET”, the url will changed based on the persons data. So, we recommend having one variable that stays constant. For example, “send=true”. So, for the URL you could just put the base (thedomain.com/theurl.php), and then for Parameter name you would put “send”, and for Parameter Value, you would put “true”. That way, whenever that page is hit with that parameter, no matter what other information is in the URL, it will count as a conversion.
We are constantly going to be re-working and improving the ways conversions are created and tracked. Obviously with our BETA launch, we couldn’t think about everyone’s needs nad create a method for each. We came up with 2 methods that should cover most tracking for now.
READING THE DATA:
Once you have a conversion set up, you can immediately start tracking conversions for that campaign. Remember, BLVD Status is LIVE data, so if people ARE converting, you should see it in your stats right away. On the main Dashboard with 6 boxes, you can see conversions in a couple different places. I have circled them below:
For this screen shot, I changed the order of the top row boxes (yeah, you can do that… drag them around — they will even stay in that order when you login again). Anyways, the obvious place to see conversions is in the “Conversions” box. This shows you the latest 50 conversions on your site. Showing the time of the conversion, the name of the conversion, the refferal or keyword search that brought them there, and then the total time it took them to make that conversion from the time they arrived at your site.
The “Referrers Box” also shows conversions. So in this screenshot, you can see a couple times where certain referrals brought conversions to my domain. The icon is shown in that row to the right if a conversion occurred. This is an easy way to see which referrers are bringing conversions.
The “Foot Traffic Box” gives you a glimpse of how many conversions you have received in a given period of time. Just an easy way to see how effective your site is during the day. I circled the area where you can see it. Basically, anytime you see the letters “CONV” in the backend, it stands for “Conversions”.
Conversions IN DEPTH:
If you click on the “In Depth” link on the conversions box, you will be able to see a more detailed view of your campaigns and which keywords/referrers brought them. You can even take each conversion down to an individual user to see which pages they visited, in which order, and how long they spent on each page… along with their browser info, region etc…
We are going to follow up over the next couple days with how to use these In Depth pages. But, most importantly you need to setup conversions to really use BLVD Status to it’s full potential. What i the point in tracking visitors, if you don’t know who or why people are doing what you want them to? Well, we solved that problem and more…
If you are having trouble using conversions or you want to tell us how well they are working for you, please feel free to post a comment below.
Thanks for the sweet response to our little brain child. My brother Patrick and I have been spending a lot of time on this. Our wives were sick of it before it ever launched 
as it became the topic of conversation when we all hung out.
Couple quick house keeping items -
First we are on Digg please go give us a vote to help spread the word if you haven’t already, there is a digg button on the homepage.
Second it is in the TOS and Policies when you sign up but we are not selling any data to anyone, nor will we. We care about out privacy just as much as you do.
Third some quick faq’s based off of emails and comments we are getting. We will be releasing a full faq section very soon along with some videos on how to do stuff.
How Long Does it Take to Show Me Data? It should literally take under 20 minutes to start showing all your data, some are quicker than others. If it is taken longer pleas email me at chris @ blvdstatus.com and send me your URL and we will take a look.
How Do I Delete a Conversion Campaign? We are working on this it should be working by the days end or so. For the time being set up a new one so that you don’t miss out on the data and you can delete the messed up campaign later.
How Do I Set Up a Campaign? From your login screen just after logging in you can click set up new campaign or from the Dashboard you can click on Configure in the Coversions Box. There you need to Identify the URL you want to track, if it is your contact form you want to put in your ThankYou Page url, if it is your RSS you want to track put in your Feed URL, the easiest way to get this right is go to your site or blog and click on the RSS button and copy and paste that URL. Make sure you choose an Icon that helps you identify quickly what type of conversion it is. Patrick is putting together a post with screen shots just for this as we speak. It is definitley one of our coolest features.
Is There Detailed Reporting Beyond the Dashboard? Every Box in the Dashboard except “Out Going Links” has an indepth button at the bottom of their box click on that (reccomended into a new tab) and it will open up a screen with just data on that bopxes focus. If it is the Keyword Box then it will show you all the data you could ever dream of regarding keyword referrals. We will ahve videos on this soon.
Anything else you want an answer on post it in the comments of this post and If it is a common question I will edit this post and make it a ruff FAQ for now.
Also real quick now that we have a blog up click on our RSS button and subscribe so you can keep updated also after you subscribe go here - http://blvdstatus.com/users/boxGrid.php5 to see our demo of our stats and you will see your RSS subscription as a conversion and see how this all works.
Thanks again for the sweet response, we want to make this your analytics we want to be the analytics that was created by the people on the front lines that have day to day needs and wants when it comes to tracking their site so any and all suggestions please leave them in the comments or email them chris @ blvdstatus.com soon we will have a suggestion box type thing set up.
Also bare with us on the Wordpress template:)
