Photo by Luigi Chiesa
The only way to tell if you're making progress is to measure it. If you're web-based and pre-revenue like me, then traffic and customer reactions are all you have to guide you. Happily Google just released their analytics API, and by combining that with Twitter you can create your own automated daily email report, absolutely free!
If you want to see the results, I'm publicly posting them on the Mailana Stats list:
http://groups.google.com/group/mailana-stats
There's also an RSS version here:
http://groups.google.com/group/mailana-stats/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml
The result is an email sent daily that looks like this:
Subject: twitter.mailana.com daily report: 04-22-09
1673 visits, 1423 visitors
15 twitter messages mentioning mailana
You can grab the source here; it's a set of bash scripts tested on Fedora and OS X. To run it on your own site you'll need to follow these steps:
1- Install Google Analytics on your site
2- Download my scripts onto your Linux machine
3- Get your profile ID. Edit galistprofiles.sh with your Google email address and password, and then run it to see a list of website's stats you have access to and each site's profile ID.
4- Enter your account details. Put your gmail address, password and the profile ID into the gatotalvisits.sh script.
5- Test your API access. Run ./gatotalvisits.sh and by default you should see a single number showing the number of visits. You can look at other stats by passing one of the many metric names as an argument to the script, eg ./gatotalvisits.sh visitors
6- Make sure you can email from the command line. The script needs a way to mail the results, and you may not this set up on you Linux box by default. I ended up following this guide and using SMTP to send from my existing Gmail account.
7- Create a Google Group. You need somewhere to organize and publish your results. My list is public, but you can also create a private version with controlled access. This also gives you an RSS feed, though obscurely you get the link by clicking on the XML button at the bottom of the group's home.
8- Pick Twitter search terms. I'm doing a daily search of Twitter for mentions of 'mailana', but you can edit emailstats.sh to look for your own keywords. Run ./latesttweets.sh <your keyword> to test.
9- Customize the email. Edit emailstats.sh to get the subject and message content in the form you want, and maybe add other stats you care about too.
10- Schedule it daily. I created a link to the script in the daily cron directory by running ln -s /vol/analytics/emailstats.sh /etc/cron.daily/emailstats.sh
You should now have a fully automated daily report email. Let me know how this works for you; I'm avoiding full XML parsing to keep the scripts lightweight so I'll be keeping an eye out for API changes that might break those assumptions.
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