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Cool WP Plugin helps track local search effectiveness

There’s a WordPress plugin called WP Download Monitor that is very useful for small business owners!

One of the biggest challenges for small business owners is making sure they get value for the money they spend marketing online. This means that everything needs to be tracked. Having Google Analytics installed is of course the first step. But if you’ve messed with Google Local Business Center (LBC) you know that Analytics and LBC don’t play too well together!

This subject came up for me recently when I was asking some questions about Google Boost. For those who don’t know, Boost is a sort of “Adwords for Dummies” program. No insults intended here, I was a tad in the dark about Boost until just a couple of days ago, but that’s the subject for another post – coming soon I promise!

This post is about the plugin remember? It’s called WP Download Monitor. This free plugin solves a very important problem for the small business marketer. Here’s what it does. After some fairly simple set up, it will track and record how many times a pdf is downloaded from your site. You can have as many downloads entered into it as you need. Why is this useful?

Because these downloads are PDF versions of your coupons! That means there is an easy way to create separate channels to track downloads for all of your coupons, one for each traffic source, i.e. – Adwords, Craigslist, and now Boost. Put a little text on the very bottom of the coupon to key it, and when some hands you a coupon, you’ll know exactly which traffic channel brought you this customer! Very cool…

Of course it also allows a lot of other great stuff like testing different versions of the coupons, and measuring different traffic channels with different sales copy. Over the next week or so I will try to get a short video up showing new users how to set this up, and I’ll talk more about Google Boost and why you should be using it with or without Adwords. Hint – part of the reason is because Google has a nice promo going on and they will give you $100 worth of impressions if you spend $50. I’ll take that offer any day of the week.