When you log into WordPress and look at the dashboard for your awesomely new WordPress Analytics Plugin, you’re probably wondering how you can limit the data to only your blog traffic.

Here’s how we did it at MailChimp…

First you’ll need to log in to Google Analytics and find your site in the “Website Profiles” list.

1. Adding a New Profile

Then, click +Add New Profile next to the web site that has your blog attached to it.

Add a New Profile to Google Analytics Account

You’ll arrive at the Create New Website Profile page. Make sure you select Add a Profile for an existing domain. Then check to make sure your main web site is selected in the “Select Domain” box.

Create a New Profile

Give your new profile a meaningful name. How about “Name of Your Site Blog”? Click “Continue” to save the profile and let’s see how the magic filtering happens.

2. Create a Filter for Your New Blog Profile

Now that your new blog profile is created it’s recording the same exact data as your web site. Don’t worry! We can filter the current data to only include your blog (aka “The Magic”).

Find and click the Edit link for the new profile you created.

This page contains all of the settings for your new profile, but we’re only interested in one area: Filters. Look for the Filters Applied to Profile section and click +Add Filter.

Profile Settings Page

Make sure Add New Filter for Profile is selected and give the filter a descriptive name, like “Blog Traffic.”

The filter type you want to select is labeled “Include only traffic to a subdirectory”  and you’ll want to use Google’s example as a baseline for finding the subdirectory. Something like “^/blog” where “blog” is the name of your main WordPress directory.

Your new profile has been added.

Save your changes and head over to your WordPress Admin.

3. Use Your New Profile in Analytics360 for WordPress

After you log in to WordPress, look under the Settings menu for Analytics360 and click over to your Analytics360 settings.

Under Step 2, you’ll want to select your new profile from the “From now on track:” select box. Click “This One!” to activate your new blog profile for Analytics360.

Your Analytics360 Settings in Wordpress

What gives? There’s No Data?

It’s going to take about 3+ hours for some data to start rolling in, like when you setup Google Analytics for the very first time. It’s actually best to give it a full 24 hours, so you’ll at least get a full day’s data in your Analytics360 Dashboard.

Be patient! All is well in the world of WordPress Analytics now.

Seriously, I had to wash my fingers after typing such nasty stuff, and I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror for a day or two.

In addition to the yuckiness, I typed in a bunch of stuff about gambling, and some phishing type content. And I made sure to use all caps, with lots of exclamation points (see why spam filters hate that).

Then I ran it through our Inbox Inspector’s Spam Checker tool…

Turns out I passed all the major spam filters!

My Spam Assassin score wasn’t great (anything over a 5 is DOA but I like to stay well below 3). But that seems to be because of other problems.

In terms of the extremely disgusting alt-text descriptions I used, they don’t seem to have triggered anything at all:

Got any questions you want the MailChimp team to answer here on the blog? Submit them here.

Learn more about MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector:

Blocks occasionally happen to everybody, so I told him we wouldn’t be immune. And believe it or not, ISPs have been known to have email problems themselves. What sucked about the guy’s situation was he couldn’t tell for sure if he was having a problem.

In MailChimp, if you want to know if your email campaign had troubles with any ISPs, you can always check your Email Domain Performance report:

In the stats above, 39% of all emails to comcast.net were bounced. It’s not a full 100% bounce rate, but it’s way above the average bounce rate for his industry. This particular user wrote me an email asking what they should do…

Since I know Comcast uses Cloudmark, I suggested they run an Inbox Inspection, because it includes actual scans using the Cloudmark spam filter. Then, they’ll know if it was a Comcast + Cloudmark issue.

If the email is extremely urgent, they could then send a followup email campaign (revised, based on their inbox inspection results) to their Comcast recipients by using MailChimp’s built-in segmentation.

The segmenting criteria would look like this:

since the user had MailChimp’s optional AIM reports installed, which tells you those who did NOT open or click (among other cool things), he could further segment his list like this:

You can see how adding the extra “those who didn’t open” criteria reduced the segment from 109 recipients to 75. Potentially, that’s about 34 fewer comcast subscribers who’d receive the followup email.

Two more tips for re-sending campaigns like this:

1. Open tracking (and did-not-open-tracking) is not 100% reliable. Duh. So phrase your followup email in such a way that if people get dupes, it’s okay. Don’t just re-send the same email. They’ll get really annoyed, and report you for spamming. Change your design (good thing you already setup those 7 basic template types, right?) and write some copy like, “our last message seemed to have some issues with ___, so we’re re-sending it because it contains some urgent blah blah etc.”
2. If at all possible, wait a day or two before resending. If your campaign caused a problem with an ISP that got a lot of your emails blocked, the problem is not going to magically disappear in a matter of minutes. If you impatiently resend bad content, the only thing ISPs will see is, “Oh, big surprise. Bozo the clown over there, who got more than a 0.1% complaint rate for his last campaign, seems to be trying again. Time to reset the un-block-when-the-complaints-subside timer.”
3. If the email campaign is extremely urgent and you can’t wait, you should dramatically alter the content (including the design and coding) of the email to reduce the chances of any of that triggering spam filters again. Make it a plain-text-only email. Put the content on your website. In the email, point to that page on your website. I’ve even seen some users micro-segmenting their lists based on criteria like, “First name starts with a, b, c, etc.” This will minimize your impact on ISPs, and help you spot further problems quickly.

They call it a “cure for writer’s block” but that doesn’t do it justice imho. My problem is the opposite of writer’s block. I can write stuff all day long, but I have no idea if it’s the stuff our customers actually want to hear about. Some customers contact me directly with questions. Our customer svc team gives me topics too.

But Skribit is finally a way for me to see how many other readers are interested in that topic. Suggest a topic for me to write about

It can answer important questions like, “Are any ISPs blocking me?” and “Which ISPs do my subscribers use most?”

It can also answer expensive questions, like, “Should I invest in email certification services like SenderScore (which gives you some benefits with Hotmail, Roadrunner, and Cox), or Goodmail (which gives you some benefits with AOL, Comcast, and Yahoo), or SuretyMail (which works with AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Earthlink among others)?

Email certification can get email past spam filters and into inboxes with images on by default, and in some cases, video will work.

But are they too expensive? Why not test? Here’s how:

For your next campaign, segment your list by an ISP domain, like hotmail:

(the segmentation screen is also a nice way to see what % of my list is actually using hotmail)

Send your campaign to this segment of Hotmail recipients. Do the same for AOL, Comcast, etc. if you want.

Log back in to MailChimp.

Check your ROI for each segment (you’ll need our e-commerce360 or Analytics360 plugins turned on):

Now you’re armed with actual data that you can use to determine how much each domain is worth to you.

Go talk to the email certification services to find out how much it’ll cost to implement for your organization and list size  (your annual email delivery volume is usually the factor), and what kind of improvement in open/click rates you might see for each domain.

Look back at your domain performance:

If you could get x more opens or clicks out of y domain, how much might that add to your bottom line?

I got this tip from Anna Billstrom, who has consulted for some really, really big companies (think mainframe computers) and writes a nice blog called Adventures in Email Marketing.

P.S. SuretyMail says they work with spam filters like Postini and Spam Assassin. Is it worth it? Why not check your campaign spam filter scores, with MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector?

Did you know you can ALSO translate your signup process to over 25 different languages?

Simply select it from the pulldown:

Here’s a list of supported languages (it’s constantly growing):

• English
• Chinese
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French (France)
• French (Canada)
• German
• Greek
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Spanish (Mexico)
• Spanish (Span)
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Ukrainian

For fun, we also threw in:

• Chimplish
• Redneck
• Jive
• Elmer Fudd
• Swedish Chef
• Pig Latin
• Hacker

If you don’t see your language on the list, and you’ll volunteer some time to help add it, let us know.

So we created this: http://caniuseapurchasedemaillist.com/

If you run an abuse desk somewhere, and you’re tired of answering that stupid question over and over, feel free to link people to it. If you’re not sure why importing a purchased email list into a 3rd party ESP is a bad thing, then promptly turn off your computer and unplug it from the wall. Thanks.

click image to enlarge

When you’re on the MailChimp dashboard, just click over to the “Reports” tab.  Then just click on the big orange “compare campaigns” button on the left side of the screen.

Click the button to download a spreadsheet containing stats for ALL your campaigns, ever.  It’s chock full of all kinds of data, will let you run your own reports in Excel and then you can build just about any pretty graph you or your boss could ever want.

For example, you can even calculate the best day to send emails based on your previous campaign open rates.

Tell us what other kinds of innovative things you’re doing with your reports as well.  We love to hear from you!

1. Log in to MailChimp
2. Go to the “Reports” tab, and click on this link under your graph:

That’ll download a spreadsheet to your computer. This file will contain stats for ALL your campaigns, ever. It’s an awesome file that will let you run your own reports in Excel, and build just about any pretty graph you or your boss could ever want. Internally, we at MailChimp call it the B.A.R.F. download (for “big ass report file”).

Okay, I’m the only person here who calls it that.

Anyway, open the file in Excel, then:

1. Sort data by the column “List” to get the data for the one list you’re looking for.
2. Delete all the other data to get it out of the way.
3. Sort data by the column “Send Weekday.”
4. Now look at the open rates for your various campaigns by day.

In excel, I made a formula to calculate the average open rate for each day. Assuming your list size is roughly the same from campaign to campaign (organic growth, no major imports, no drastic segmentation), you should be fine doing so.

Below is a screenshot. Looks like Tuesday averages highest for this particular list.

Want to know where we got the idea for the B.A.R.F. download?

Whenever we’ve met with MailChimp users in their workplace, they always sit down with us and ask us questions about their stats. Every single time, the person we’re meeting with has an Excel spreadsheet printed out. It’s amazing to see the different things they measure and compare from campaign to campaign. Seriously, I’ve never seen so many different ways to look at the same numbers.

Every company’s different, and every manager wants to see different stats in different ways.

So we thought, “instead of forcing people to click into each and every campaign to gather their stats for an excel file, and instead of trying to come up with every conceivable graph that people might want, why not just barf out all their stats at once?”

Have you tried your B.A.R.F. download yet?

Here’s a common question I get: “My list is puny. If buying email lists is evil, how can I grow my subscriber base? Fast?”

Well, one way to get more people to signup for your email list is to give them something free when they subscribe. To make it automatic, you can add e-coupons, or links to whitepapers inside your welcome emails.

For example, let’s say you’re a music store, and when people signup for your email newsletter, you want to send them some free music tips. But you want those music tips to be customized to their interests.

If someone rocks the pan flute, they should receive a welcome email with an embedded link to download a PDF called “Zamfir’s Pan Flute Secrets.” If someone is a guitar hero, they get a free guide on guitar playing. You get the gist.

Here’s how to do this in MailChimp…

We’re basically going to be using dynamic merge tags in your welcome messages. In particular, “If Interested” tag:

So let’s say you’re that music store in my example above. The name of your music store is “Rawk On Music.”

First, you setup a list in MailChimp for the “Rawk On Newsletter.” Your list will get a free signup form in MailChimp.

You can customize the fields in that subscribe form. In particular, you want to add an “Interest groups” field that asks people to check a box for which musical instruments they play:

Then, maybe you use our signup form designer to customize the look and feel to match your website:

The final signup form looks like this:

While you’re using MailChimp’s signup designer, use the pulldown on the right to switch over to the “Final Welcome to our list email” screen:

Now you’ll see a preview of what your final welcome email will look like. This is what your subscribers see after they confirm they want to signup for your list. Normally, people leave this welcome email as-is, and that’s okay, but they should really take some time to customize it and add a little personality to it.

Click on the welcome text to open the editor and customize it:

With the editor open, use MailChimp’s advanced merge tags to insert a conditional statement like this (and I used the WYSIWYG toolbar to insert hyperlinks):

This is the code I used:

Notice I made it dynamically change links to different “musical tips” download files. But you can insert whatever you want inside the merge tags, like graphics, 10% off your next purchase coupons, product photos, paragraphs of content, etc.

Test it by signing up for your own list, so you can receive a welcome email. The way to get to your list’s signup form (hosted on MailChimp) is:

• Log in to MailChimp. If you’re already logged in, then just hold down control (to open a new browser tab) and then:
• Click the “Lists” tab in MailChimp’s top nav
• Select the list you’re working on
• It should expand, showing some options.
• Click the “Generate Form Code” link
• At the top of the next page, we’ll give you the signup form’s URL.

To test my work, I signed up and checked the boxes for “Guitar” and “Pan Flute.”

When I got the final welcome email, it looked like:

And that’s it. All my subscribers will now get a free, downloadable music tips PDF that’s specific to their favorite instrument.

At this point, I’d recommend going back to your signup form, and adding some text that tells people they’ll get a “free gift” when they sign up. Also, you can customize your thank you pages to tell people, “Don’t forget to confirm your subscription, so you can get that free gift.” In general, go back and look at all your marketing efforts to try to point as many people to that free gift and opt-in form as possible.

What kind of free download or incentive can you give to people for signing up? Everyone’s an expert at something. Write a one-page whitepaper!

Even better:

• Write a useful whitepaper
• Offer it as an incentive for subscribing to your newsletter
• Start a Google Adwords campaign to drive traffic to your signup form

Rawk on!