wordpress 101 - all about stats
DESCRIPTION
A look at WordPress's Site Stats feature - what it does and how to use it.TRANSCRIPT
WordPress 101All About
Stats
Denise Barrett Olson
A Moultrie Creek Guide
Once you get your blog up and running and have a few posts under your belt, you’ll probably want to see what kind of attention you’re getting. WordPress offers help with their Site Stats package. WordPress.com users will find it as the Site Stats item in the Dashboard menu. Self-hosted users will first need to install the Jetpack plugin and activate Site Stats. Once that’s done, you’ll find it under the Jetpack section. You’ll also find an option to display an abbreviated stats box on your Dashboard screen - it’s located under the Screen Options menu at the top right of the Dashboard screen.
Once you have activated WordPress Stats in Jetpack, click on the Configure link that appears to the right. A screen similar to this one appears.
Check the Admin bar option to display a stats chart on your Dashboard.
Since I don’t want the time I spend on the site counted as visitors, I leave the Registered users section blank.
The Report visibility options are used to determine who can view the stats reports. Since there’s only me, I’ve just checked the Administrator box. If you are running a blog with multiple contributors, you will want them to see the reports. You don’t identify them by user name, but by the role you have assigned them.
Most of the examples in this guide come from my Moultrie Creek site (http://moultriecreek.us). It serves as the “front door” to my other sites and has very little content of its own. Keeping stats on this site still has value since it’s showing how people find me and where they go from here.
The Dashboard screen displays a quick view of your stats with a link to View All. You can also use the Site Stats option in the Jetpack menu on the sidebar.
This is the stats report screen maintained on your site. It’s great for a quick overview, but to see the enhanced stats report, you’ll need to go to WordPress.com. Click on the Show Me button at the top of the screen.
There are two primary counters in site stats - views and visitors. A view is counted each time a visitor loads or reloads a page. A visitor is counted only once in the period you are viewing. For example, if you are looking at visitors in a week view, that person will only be counted once for that week - even if he or she made multiple visits. The daily view will show each of the days that person visited - but only counted as one visitor per day.
Like the Dashboard, the stats components can be rearranged by dragging and dropping them in your preferred location. These have been arranged so all would be visible on the screen.
Each item offers several options. First, you are seeing today’s stats in each panel, but you can click the Yesterday link to display those stats. The Summaries link provides summaries across broader timelines. The looking glass icon takes you to detailed stats for that particular item.
You can learn a lot about your visitors by drilling down into the individual sections:
• Search Engine Terms shows you what search queries were used to find your site.
• Views by Country show where your visitors are coming from. • Top Posts & Pages show which content they read. • Referrers lists the search engines and outside sites that pointed
visitors to your site. • Clicks documents the links contained in your pages that your
visitors clicked.
The Views by Country can be quite fascinating. The darker the color, the more visitors you’ve had from that country.
Clicking the hourglass icon for a specific post displays a number of stats and averages over time. At the bottom of the screen is a summary defining the logic that generated these numbers.
Last, but not least, is the New Year’s Annual Report - an animated look at your blog’s activity in the year that just ended - and with fireworks too. It’s quite informative - and entertaining too!
Tips Use the Referrers detail to see where your readers are coming from. Follow the links to check out their site. Who knows, you might just discover a research cousin.
If you are using affiliate marketing to help support your geneablogging habit, use the Clicks detail to see which sites/products are popular and which are not.
Reviewing search terms can help you develop tags and post titles for future posts to make it easier for your research cousins to find you.
Resources WordPress.com’s Stats support page
WordPress documentation
Jetpack home page
Moultrie Creek Gazette
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. For more information regarding this presentation contact me at http://moultriecreek.us or by email at [email protected].
Contact Info Denise Barrett Olson St. Augustine, Florida http://moultriecreek.us Twitter - @moultriecreek Email - [email protected]