Nerd alert:
If we want to interpret web statistics it is useful to have information when important events happened. Such an event is the date a new blog post is published. I use Google Analytics and Piwik next to each other, mostly for testing and comparing. Both Google Analytics and Piwik have ‘annotations’. These can be used to analyse your data. However….

The connection between this WordPress site and Piwik is handled by the plugin WP-Piwik. This plugin is responsible for recording website visits. But it is also possible to automatically send an annotation to Piwik if a new blog post is published. These annotations are for instance displayed in the ‘Evolution over the period’ graph on the visitors overview page. You can easily see when a certain post is published and compare this with the user visits statistics (see graph).

Google Analytics also have annotations, but unfortunately the Google Analytics API does not seem to have a method (yet?) to receive these annotations from an external source (you could add these manually each time you publis a post, but who is going to do this?) A work around is provided with the WordPress plugin Google Analytics Internal. It should trigger an Analytics event when we publish a post.

This morning I installed this plugin and now it is time to test to see if it is working and to investigate how we can use these event to get a better insight of the influence of certain blog post to website visits

Results in Google Analytics

It took a while, but via custom reports I’m able to display the publish event and the page visits at the same time. And I could investigate which events took place. But it needs some further investigation to see if we can tailor this more to my wishes…. (and some more time to display the graph with the effect of this blogpost)