I recently wrote a PHP script to send me an email when Google refers any visitors to my website. It includes the search terms that a user was searching for and also the address of the page that the user ends up on in your site.

This information is readily available in apps such as Google Analytics though the purpose of this script is to make the information more readily available, to receive updates of visitors in real time via email.

A few people were interested in this little script and so I set up www.whatsgoogleupto.com to host the script and act as a free and open repository where I can upload ongoing changes and improvements.  It was also an opportunity to try out Beanstalk as an SVN repository and SimplePie for showing the RSS feed of recent commits to the Repository.

Since putting up this script I wanted to make it into a Wordpress plugin to make it a little more accessible to people with blogs that didn’t want to be editing the script to add in their own email address etc.

The Wordpress plugin is now done and it can be downloaded from the Tools page. To use it, simply download the plugin, uncompress it, add it to the plugins folder of your wordpress blog, activate it and then sit back and wait to be notified when Google sends any visitors to your blog. Its especially useful if you are trying out specific keywords and to be notified when they work.

The plugin uses the existing blog user details so theres no need to tweak the script to add in your name or email address.