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Bloggers are generally eager to see their blog stats and referring traffic, but when they see the real tracking data on any web service they nearly miss half of the referrers, that are coming from desktop apps (like TweetDeck, FeedDemon,..) and see them as direct traffic.

To track those showing as direct traffic, Google analytics provides Campaign Tagging feature to its users. Campaign Tagging allows users to add variables to their blog post urls so that these urls can be tracked where ever they go. But manually adding variables to each blog post urls is some thing that should be done by programming, and luckily there are Wordpress plugins, and bookmarklet will do this for you.

Track RSS traffic:

Tracked RSS Wordpress plugin adds campaign tags to your blog feed, so traffic coming from desktop feed readers is also tracked in Google analytics as RSS traffic.

Track Twitter traffic:

Tracked Tweets Wordpress plugin adds campaign tags to your blog post link, and posts it with shortened url as soon as you publish the post on your blog. It uses popular url shortening service to shrink blog post url. From now traffic coming from  TweetDeck, Twhirl, iPhone app,.. is tracked in Google analytics.

Track those tweets that you manually post them on Twitter:

Yoast has come up with a brilliant bookmarklet, which adds Google analytics campaign tags to the url in your browser and forwards you to Twitter website with a shortened url. Useful if you prefer to manually tweet your blog posts. Note: You should make some changes to bookmarklet code before you can use it for your blog posts.

If you post links on many social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace,.. just change the UTM variables to the name of the site. The code shown below is used for Twitter.

?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter

Setup Google Analytics to track RSS feed links:

Gyutae Park at Winning the Web has a nice post which helps blog admin to determine which of the blog RSS feed links(like RSS button in the sidebar, sidebar email form, Greetbox rss link, rss link below each post,… ) on his blog work better and which don’t, based on the clicks tracked by Google Analytics.

The above screenshot shows the tracked data of visitors’ clicks for each rss link on his blog.

With all this setup blog admin will surely has the most possible accurate traffic sources for his blog.