- Image by gillicious via Flickr
Ladies and Gentleman, today you life and your blogging habits, as you know them will change forever! And not necessary to the best as I’m about to show you how to get MORE information about your blog, how your visitors interact with your content and where they are coming from than most bloggers need to know!
In Fact – Stats Tracking is One Of The Most Addictive And Time Wasting Activities You, As A Blogger Can Participate In!
I highly recommend you stop reading RIGHT NOW and don’t click that “Read More..” link to save your sanity and time!
OK, so I see you are determined to know! Well, this could be a GREAT thing as well as BAD thing for you. You have to exercise the discipline and limit time you dedicate to stat tracking to avoid waste of time and if you manage to do so – you are going to be a MUCH MORE INFORMED blogger.
5 Stats Tracking Plugins
…presented in this post will allow you to see more details about your blog traffic, its source and how your visitors interact with your content than you ever thought possible!
Along with Google Analytic’s this plugin might be that is needed for the majority of bloggers as it allows you to re-use same WordPress.com API you are already using for Akismet and presents you with most of the useful statistics you need:
- Top Pages and posts for different time frames with default being today
- Your referrers, to help you see who sends you traffic
- What key phrases lead from Search Engines to your blog posts
- What links were clicked in your blog content
- List of incoming links, mentions of your blog url on other blogs
Because it is a plugin maintained by WordPress core team, it is always timely updated and you can be sure it will continue to be compatible with all the latest upgrades.
2. Google Analytic’s Integration Plugins
Instead of picking and choosing any specific plugin, I simply give you URL to search results in WordPress.org plugin repository. You choose which one gives you the options you need as this breed of plugins integrates Google Analytics into your blog.
I do believe that you MUST have Google Analytics on your blog for stats tracking and comprehensive reporting but I choose NOT to use plugins but simply manually insert code into fotter.php right before the </body> closing tag. Just inspect the source code of this blog and you see what I mean.
I like to use as few plugins as possible and by doing this manually I save on page load by not having an extra plugin for the task that can be easily accomplished by hand. But if you are not into modifying theme files or like to switch themes often – these plugins will make sure that you blog will be tracked no matter what you do!
3. Visitor Maps and Who’s Online
In my testing this plugin added to the page load speed and I eventually disabled it but if you want to know EXACTLY who is visiting your blog, what OS, Browser they are using, where they are coming from and what is it they are reading – this plugin will be a God sent!
I promise you that you can get more information than you ever bargained for by using this one but do pay attention if it impacts you blog loading speed, as implementation of this one might actually cause people to click away instead of waiting for your content to load and all you will see is How Many People Left Your Blog without reading it!
This plugin allows you to integrate your WordPress blog with free Lijit account. Great option to enhance your blog search as well as to get a LOT of information about your blog. It does help you get more traffic as your blog becomes part of their searched network and presented on other blogs 🙂
Anytime I can get free traffic – I’m game, especially when it is integrated with my favorite time wasting exercise – Traffic Stats Checking!
Couple of the most important statistics I look for from this one is Last Searches Performed on My Blog and Last Searches That Returned No Results!
It opens up an opportunity for me to create content my readers and visitors are looking for and one that doesn’t exist yet. Obviously that the younger your blog – more opportunities you will have as with age it seems sometimes that we cover pretty much most of the important ideas 🙂
5. Feed Stats
Yeah, when we are talking about stats – your RSS readers information is VERY important. Number of RSS readers on the blog is in fact one of the aspects many bloggers, including myself always put forth as it shows Stable Readership Base that can be used when selling advertisement space on your blog among the few other things 🙂
This plugin give you easy access to see:
- Subscribers
- Hits
- Reach (see the FAQ section for more information about this)
- Item click-through
- Item Views
Pretty nice but it does require that you burn your feed through FeedBurner as it uses its data to provide you with stats.
Conclusion
5 plugins I have just shared with you can make you a lot more informed blogger and help you determine what works and what doesn’t in your promotional efforts but I recommend you use these plugins in moderation!
Just because something is available to you – doesn’t mean all of it have to be used. If you attempt to utilize all plugins at same time – more than likely your blog load speed will be impacted!
Choose what stats are important to you – use appropriate plugin to get it! Enjoy and as always – comment on this post and share it using options provided!
Related WordPress Plugins Articles
- Analytics 101 – Traditional Service Overview (piosocialmediatraining.com)
- My 45 must have WordPress plugins. Any to add to the list? (trishussey.com)
Good timing. I was just lamenting the fact that AWStats gives me detailed info on my html/php sites, but nothing more than the number of visits to my blog (haven’t gotten through your Google Analytics module yet). I’m getting quite a bit of traffic, even though I haven’t really promoted the blog as it is my first one, for experimental purposes really, but I would like to know what search terms people are finding me with, because apparently they are coming from somewhere! So the wordpress.com stats is all I need for now – – just installed it!
Thanks for the timely tip!
.-= Garth´s last blog ..5 Secrets Couples Should Know For A Long And Healthy Marriage =-.
Thanx Alex…I like the sounds of wp stats & lijit…do you suggest running them together or only one or the other…I really appreciate your blog…Kenney
http://my-you-tube.com
.-= Kenney´s last blog ..Matter of Perspective =-.
I’m unique. Up to this point I’ve rarely, very rarely checked stats. I’ve always used statcounter.com when I did though.
I will surely be checking out some of these plugins though. 🙂
.-= Dennis Edell´s last blog ..UPDATED: Theme Customization Part 3 – Banner Advertising NOT for Sale! =-.
Great overview. As a matter of fact, I was just reasearching stat plugins for WP after I moved my blog. Thanks a lot!
I used Google Analyticator plug in for Google Analytics for a long time. But recently, it stopped tracking goals correctly so I switched to Ultimate Google Analytics and it is working correctly again. Goals is a great feature of Google Analytics. It lets you see how many of your visitors are visiting the pages/clicking the links that you want them to. I really like the sound of lijit though, especially the searches with no results feature.
.-= Emma Knight´s last blog ..Auctioneer Tutorial – How to Auctioneer from A to Z =-.
Hi Alex,
I really liked this post as I am researching ways to make my analytics program more blog friendly.
Thank you for the content and inspiration as always,
Mark Brown
Co-Owner http://www.ProTrackerPlus.com
I use statscounter and google webmaster tools. I’m a little concerned though that if you list multiple websites with google webmaster tools, that they punish you for being the owner of multiple sites.
.-= Amos´s last blog ..Miami Herald Reports Push for Small Business Loans =-.
I am used one Google Analytics ^)
.-= Sarg´s last blog ..О инфобизнесе в сети. =-.
Right now I’m mainly using G Analytics for stat tracking. Never knew that there was a WP plugin for the same! 🙂
.-= TechChunks´s last blog ..Ultimate Collection of Top 20 Funny Apple iPad Pictures (Photo Manipulations) =-.
Great.. I already spend too much time with Google Analytics, but now I can see myself spending more on these new additions! Haha, thank you for the post though. The only problem I have really come across with stat plugins, is that they can bog down your WP install.. Regardless, I will still have to try some of these new ones out
.-= Ryan Cowles´s last blog ..Mt. Baldy California – Photography =-.
Great information and product, I recently had a WP blog hacked that was on in the number 1 spot on google for a popular keyword. This will not only help protect my blog but will help build traffic to my websites.
This is a great list, but talk about distraction… I wouldn’t pick more than one to have on my blog. Google Analytics is a must have, but as you said, no plugin is required and you just need to manually write the code in your footer. And having Lijit Statistics is very useful because it will tell you what keywords are good, which ones you need to improve and which ones you should write more content about.
Nice collection but i use Histats for Tracking visitor its a really nice solution for me .a complete tracking solution .you can try this .
I'm using histats.com and its satisfied. May you can try it. 🙂
Thanks