Add new comment

WordPress, Statistics and Plugins, Oh My!
Submitted by mivox on 1 November, 2007 - 7:17pm.

So yes, the new site is running on WordPress, which I'd had some experience with in the past, but never so far as actually getting serious about trying to promote a site built with it. Because I am mostly lazy, and mostly a hobbyist, and mostly couldn't be bothered. But for some reason my little f-ckingc-nts.com project has really fired my imagination, and suddenly I'm a total stats whore. Which kinda sucks with a default WordPress install ... For one thing, WordPress itself, being a blogging platform and not a full-featured hosting package, has no built-in stats functions to speak of. For another thing, the vast majority of WordPress bloggers seem entirely more interested in the fun-and-easy aspects of blogging, and so most of what you find when you look for a stats plugin are cute little sidebar widgets that publically list your top 10 most popular posts, and other mostly-useless features for my purposes.

However, I've found two really excellent 'built-in' WordPress visitor statistic plugins, as well as one that pulls external stats from Feedburner and Google Analytics into your WordPress dashboard:

  • Live, from Headzoo
    This little gem was suggested to me by a friend ... it shows hits to your blog in real-time, scrolling down a page in your Dashboard area as they happen. Landing page, referring URL and visitor's IP address are all displayed, and clickable. My only complaint? There is no way to exclude your own visits from the display. Add the option to exclude visits by a logged-in admin, and this is perhaps the most addictive little stat gadget ever ...
  • StatPress by Daniele Lippi, irisco
    This plugin automatically excludes visits by logged in site members, and opens with a nice little overview bar graph that separates out spider visits, visitors, total pageviews and feed visits. You can then view detailed data that includes most recent pages visited, most popular pages, referrers and search phrases ... This plugin itself does almost everything I'd want a stat plugin for WordPress to do, except that the "Top" lists in the detail view (top referrers, top search phrases, etc.) don't seem to have any way to click through to a complete list of the item in question.
  • Tan Tan Noodles's Wordpress Reports
    Another recommendation from a friend, this plugin pulls data from Google Analytics and Feedburner, and displays an overview in your Wordpress Dashboard. However the data actually displayed on your site isn't terribly detailed, so you still have to go to either Google or Feedburner directly if you want any specific data. What would really make this plugin stand out is if each general overview actually linked directly to the appropriate section of your Google Analytics or Feedburner accounts ...

For now, those are the three on-site stat tools I'm using, and I must say I think they're all quite nice to have in their own individual ways. Obviously I'm currently using Google Analytics for my offsite stats, but I've had another off-site stats package recommended recently. After I've had it installed for a week or two, I'll be back with a comparison between that and The Borg's ... err ... Google's analytics service. Until then, stay tuned ... new toys, new toys, so very many new toys!

Reply

*
*
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.


*

  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • You can use BBCode tags in the text, URLs will be automatically converted to links
Verify comment authorship
Captcha Image: you will need to recognize the text in it.
*
Please type in the letters/numbers that are shown in the image above.