Once your website is up and running, you will no doubt be curious about how many people are visiting and what they are interested in and what they are not. So how do you find this out? As is often the case, there are several WordPress plugins out there that can help you learn all kinds of information about your visitors. We can all celebrate that all of these services are free. Let’s see what stats tools are out there for you to use.
1. WordPress.com Stats. This plugin is made by Automattic the company behind WordPress. It requires you to create a free account at WordPress.com and get an API key which you will find under your user profile. (This is the same key you use for Akismet comment spam if you use that service). Once you’ve downloaded the plugin here and installed it, it will begin collecting information on all visitors who are not logged in. That is a consideration if you plan on having people who are a part of your community sign into accounts on your site when they visit. You will not have a record of their visits, what they read, how long the stayed, or how many pages they saw during their visit.
The WordPress.com Stats plugin provides basic information about visitors to your site. It adds a small stats panel to your dashboard that looks like this:
It also adds a link to your admin called “Blog Stats” where you can get into more detail about visitors, search terms, trends and so forth.
2. Google Analytics. The amount of free services that Google offers is truly staggering. I use analytics on Organized Themes because I find the details it provides quite helpful. One of the interesting features is the mapping of your site’s visitors.
You can see where your visitors are coming from, actually from anywhere on the planet. It breaks visits down by country and then into state and/or city. When I started this site, I never dreamed that churches beyond the US, much less beyond the English speaking world, would have an interest in my site and themes, but people have visited from over 50 countries. To be honest, that just blows me away.
I also use Google Adwords for advertising and analytics connects into my Adwords dashboard providing me with even more information. It’s easy to see how many of my visitors are there because of an add that I placed versus finding this site by more traditional means. Google also provides suggestions on how to improve your site so that you get a better rank in search listings. Since Google is the king of search engines, we all want to take their advise on how to improve rankings in their system.
You can find out more about Google Analytics and how to install it here.
3. StatPress. This is a simple plugin that provides basic information about number of visitors, page views and more. What it offers is a glimpse of not only actual visitors, but search engine spiders and RSS feeds from your site. While I still recommend using Feedburner for your RSS feeds, you can get a quick indication of new subscribers and total number of subscribers.
The information on spiders is useful because both analytics and WordPress Stats don’t provide it and it lets you know that search engines are checking the content on your site for updates. If they aren’t checking, then you probably aren’t going to be listed very highly. You can download StatPress here.
There are other options out there, but these three will get you started. I should note, that it will take some time for all of these systems to gather information, so don’t expect much in the way of useful information on day one. Give it a bit of time and watch as trends develop. Then you will be able to make more meaningful strategic decisions.