Foursquare, a location-based micro-blogging service that launched in 2009 seems to be on the verge of relevance. In preparation for their marketing push at SXSW they announced that they have added 500,000 new members bringing their total to somewhere in the 1 million area. Additionally, they are launching a free analytics service for business owners so that could create interesting marketing opportunities for businesses that are based on foot traffic. I’m rooting for them because this could become a very interesting marketing medium.

I hate the click. We obsess about clicks. We track clicks. We pay for clicks. We want more and more clicks. We are click-absorbed and it is time to make online marketing about more than this. This week marked the 15th anniversary of the first online banner ad so I have chosen this time to launch a revolt against the single-minded click-only metrics that prevail today.

If you publish a blog or any site with an RSS feed you have probably been frustrated by the lack of information that you get from the click activity in the feed. Though there are certainly ways around it Google has just announced an integration with Feedburner that makes RSS analytics easily accessible. This article from the Google Analytics blog explains it in detail but here are some of the highlights and a screenshot of what to expect.

Google Analytics continues to become an even more powerful tool with some recent additions that are outlined in this article on the Google Analytics blog. In the past we have only been able to set specific urls as goals which works well for ecommerce sites.  However, what if you have a shopping or booking engine [...]

Much is discussed about how to track the ROI of social media marketing efforts and it seems that in the space of time it will take me to type this that 3 new Twitter software tools will launch that claim to do this. However, most of us have some tools are our disposal right now that do a darn good job of getting us very detailed information if we are prepared to take an extra step or two. By combining tracking urls like those generated by Google analytics with a URL shortener like bit.ly you can not only get information on the clikc activity of your inbound links from social media posts but you can filter your analytics to create reports on what the traffic is doing once they enter your site.

This is the kind of thing that I hesitate to admit getting excited in fear of forever being branded as nerdy beyond salvation but in this case I had to risk it. The Google analytics blog has a great post about several free new Excel plugins that have come out that use the Google analytics APIs to allow you to generate your analytics reports right in Excel. This is an interestting use of the API and a great time-saver for those of use to generating analytics reports and then crunching through them on our own in Excel.

Paul Knegten posted a simple little cost-per-acquisition (CPA) calculator that got picked up by ClickZ and is now here on their site. If you would like to have the illusion of knowing how much a sale, sign-up, or conversion cost relative to the online advertising that “drove” it, use this tool. I’ve used this stat many times and I find it helpful but it also poses pitfalls because it only takes into account the most proximate message that a visitor received before conversion and fails to account for any of the other factors that could have made that conversion possible.

Here is an interesting tool that analyzes the content of your website and reports back to you about what percentage of the content is self-focused or customer focused. It is not entirely accurate but is an intersting way of looking at your site that goes beyond typical SEO tools. I typed in two sites I [...]

I just had a Homer Simpson moment when I realized that Google provides the following simple tool for building URLs that track custom variables in ad campaigns and I had not known about until today. Check it out here.