Once you’ve set up your WordPress blog and signed up for AdSense, you’ll want to know how well you’re performing.

There are all sorts of tools you can use to provide the information you need – and generally the more information you have, the better. Otherwise how are you going to be able to refine your blog so that you’re maximising your income?

GoogleAnalytics gives you a lot of information, of course. But a friend, Adi Gaskell of The Management Blog, recently pointed us in the direction of a WordPress plugin called Analytics360° which integrates GA into your blog so that you can tell what effect your posts have had on your earnings. You can also integrate MailChimp stats if you’re using MailChimp for email marketing or publicity campaigns. (In case you hadn’t guessed, the plugin’s written by MailChimp.)

We installed it on a couple of our blogs to evaluate it. It was moderately useful in that it saved you having to go to the GA site. (We don’t use MailChimp, so that particular plugin facility wasn’t relevant to us.)

However, it had its limitations too. Most importantly, it didn’t provide nearly so much information as GA. But the integration – correlating traffic to posts – was limited to the first post on any given day. So if you’d made several posts on the same day, there was nothing on the traffic graph to show you that.

Verdict: It might be worth installing if you’ve got a MailChimp account. Otherwise, you’re as well to just open GA in a separate browser window and compare it with your post history.