I’ve found statistics play a major role in how I produce content for my blog, knowing the best time of the day to publish a post, what days of the week produce the most traffic, what links are getting clicked and what time of the day people are clicking them, and what are my most popular articles, are just some of the stats I like to keep track of.
Keeping an eye on the my statistics helps me to stay focused on my blog and can also give me a wonderful insight into the direction I could take for producing new content for my readers.
Below is a list of Plugins I have found that will help to keep track of the data and statistics of your site, Most of these plugins are for WordPress 2.7 and up, and require a Google analytics account, others work by using the WordPress API, while others rely on tracking from various sources from around the web.
I’m sure you will find a plugin on this list that will meet your needs, So all you have to do now is decide on the best statistics and tracking plugin for your site and enjoy.
My disclaimer; Install these plugins at your own risk and make sure you have a regular backed up copy of your database handy when installing any new plugin to your site.
The Wp-stattraq plugin by tmcookies and strings28 will allow you to keep track of every hit on your public WordPress site, it does not track admin activity.
The following views are available:
- Summary View – an overview of blog activity
- Hit Counter – a drill-down report of hits for various periods of time
- User Counter – Track the number of individual computers who came to the site
- Page Views – track the number of total views your WordPress installation served
- Browser – Find out what browsers visited your site
- Referrer – What other sites brought traffic to your own site
- Search Terms – What search terms did search engined link to your site
- SE Saturation – what percent of pages on your site have been crawled by the GoogleBot or the BingBot
- IP addresses – What individual IP addresses requested data from your site
To use the Woopra Analytics Plugin by eliekhoury, markjaquith and ShaneF, you need an active account on Woopra.com. Woopra is a comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application.
The Plugin Features include:
- Live Tracking and Web Statistics
- A rich user interface and client monitoring application
- Real-time Analytics
- Manage Multiple Blogs and Websites
- Deep analytic and search capabilities
- Click-to-chat
- Visitor and member tagging
- Real-time notifications
- Easy Installation and Update Notification
This plugin can show you real time statistics about your blog, tracks your friend’s visit, collects information about your sites visitors, spiders, keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.
The Google Integration Toolkit plugin by Daniel Frużyński, allows you to easily integrate Google services with your blog, you can check how your site is indexed in Google (using Google Webmaster Tools), get detailed statistics (Google Analytics), earn money (Google AdSense) and more.
This version of Google Integration Toolkit plugin provides following features:
- Integration with Google Webmasters Tools (both verification methods are supported: meta tag and verification file);
- Integration with Google Analytics (with optional Google Analytics – Google AdSense integration);
- RSS/Atom Feeds tagging – you can track visitors coming from your feed using Google Analytics;
- 404 error tracking using Google Analytics;
- AdSense Section Targeting – improve AdSense ads targeting;
It also includes the following translations
- English
- Polish
- Russian
The WP-Stats-Dashboard plugin by Dave Ligthart displays the WordPress.com stats graph directly in your Dashboard.
Notable features of this plugin are…
- Display the WordPress.com statistics graph in your dashboard.
- Choose the type of stats graph you want to display.
- Automatic Login.
- Stats Dashboard Widgets (graph, overview, clicks, referrers, post views and search terms).
- Google pagerank, Google social graph, Google backlinks, alexa rank, technorati rank, del.icio.us saves, compete rank, moz rank and yahoo rank in overview.
- WordPress MU, safe_mode compatible.
MailChimp’s Analytics360 plugin allows you to pull Google Analytics and MailChimp data directly into your WordPress dashboard, so you can access robust analytics tools without leaving WordPress.
Notable features of this plugin are…
- Site Traffic: Visualize your site’s traffic trends and see how blog posts and email campaigns affect overall traffic. You can also isolate traffic coming directly to your site from email campaigns with the “campaign traffic” tab.
- List Growth: Chart the growth of your mailing list over time. Compare new and existing subscribers. And if you’ve got multiple lists, see how they stack up to each other.
- Top Referrers: Curious how all that new traffic ended up on your site? Wondering if more people are finding you through search or direct referrals? This plugin Will break it all down for you with Google Analytics.
The StatPress plugin by Daniele Lippi was the first real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc.
Notable features of this plugin are…
- Once the plugin StatPress has been activated it immediately starts to collect statistics information.
- Using StatPress you could spy your visitors while they are surfing your blog and check which are the preferred pages, posts and categories.
- In the Dashboard menu you will find the StatPress page where you could look up the statistics (overview or detailed).
- StatPress also includes a widget one can possibly add to a sidebar (or easy PHP code if you can’t use widgets!).
It also includes the following translations.
- English,
- Italian,
- Spanish,
- French,
- German,
- Russian,
- Norwegian,
- Dutch,
- Brazilian,
- Turkish,
- Swedish,
- Danish,
- Persian,
Subscriber Inbound Traffic Tracker
The Subscriber Inbound Traffic Tracker by Brian Cray will Automatically tag RSS permalinks with UTM campaign tags so you can directly attribute traffic from your subscribers.
Your subscriber traffic will automatically be segmented in your Google Analytics
Google Analytics for WordPress
The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin by Joost de Valk automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, track image search queries and it will even work together with Urchin.
In the options panel for the plugin, you can determine the prefixes to use for the different kinds of outbound links and downloads it tracks.
The Google Analyticator by cavemonkey50, jesse_altman and spiralwebconsulting adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.
Notable features of this plugin are…
- Supports standard Google Analytics tracking
- Includes an admin dashboard widget that displays a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches
- Includes a widget that can be used to display visitor stat information on the front-end
- Supports outbound link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress
- Supports download link tracking
- Supports event tracking with outbound links / downloads instead of the old pageview tracking method
- Allows hiding of Administrator visits without affecting Google Analytics’ site overlay feature
- Supports any advanced tracking code Google provides
- Installs easily – unlike other plugins, the user doesn’t even have to know their Analytics UID
- Allows tracking code to be placed in the footer to ensure faster load times
- Provides complete control over options; disable any feature if needed
- Supports localization – get the settings page in your language of choice
The Piwik Analytics Plugin by Jules Stuifbergen is a basic wordpress plugin for the Piwik web Analytics tool. It adds the piwik javascript code into every page of your weblog. It is based quite heavily on the Google Analytics wordpress plugin by Joost de Valk.
The following options are supported:
- piwik hostname
- piwik path
- site ID
- option to control download tracking
- option to exclude the admin user (probably you)
This plugin requires a running Piwik installation somewhere under your control. It does not include Piwik itself.
The Graphical Statistics Report plugin by Gopi.R will display a graphical report for the sites admin about the Monthly user registration count, Monthly post count graphical report, Monthly comments posted count and Category wise post count graphical report.
The Spider Tracker plugin by Tony Fernandes will track web spiders’ activity on your WordPress blog. It features a friendly user interface allowing you to define which spiders to track and how many recent index crawls to store for each.
The main statistics page will list all your active spiders showing real time stats for each including the last x pages visited by the spider (x is defined by you!), it also reports how many pages each spider has crawled since you set up that spider or since you last reset that spider’s stats, information about the spider such as a link to its homepage, its function, characteristics and more.
The mySTAT plugin by KILLER provides you with more than 50 reports. The plugin is easy to install and to set up, it counts all of the visitors of your web-site – both humans and robots. All data is stored at your server.
The WP-ShortStat plugin by chuyskywalker, happyarts is a lite statistics plugin for WordPress.
The Statpress SEOlution plugin by Christoph Grabo is a fork of the Statpress Reloaded plugin with some additional improvements.
Notable features of this plugin are…
- flash charts for statistics
- detailed stats for some search engine robots (spiders) like Google, Yahoo and MSN
- general spider stats
- tabbed sections in some views to avoid long scrolling
- some charts with (moving and weighted) average lines
- and all features you know from Statpress Reloaded.
The WordPress.com Stats plugin by skeltoac and mdawaffe collects information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page
Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic.
All of the processing and collection runs on the WordPress servers not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account, and it’s one of the fastest stats systems, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.
The WP-Piwik plugin by André Bräkling adds a Piwik stats site to your WordPress dashboard. It’s also able to add the Piwik tracking code to your blog using wp_footer.
You need a running Piwik installation to view your stats.
It also includes the following translations.
- English.
- German.
The Social Traffic Monitor plugin by Christopher Finke monitors your blog traffic for activity coming from social news or bookmarking sites.
When someone clicks on a link to your blog on one of the major social news or bookmarking sites (currently Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Newsvine, Fark, Slashdot, Del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon), the plugin begins to log the visits to that page. This data can then be displayed in the form of a graph of visitors per hour.
The WP-phpMyVisites plugin by Frank Bültge gives a lot of information on websites visitors, visited pages, software/hardware utilization, etc… The GUI Interface is fun and practical. The installation is entirely automated and very simple.
phpMyVisites is a free and powerful open source (GNU/GPL) software for websites statistics and audience measurements.
The web analytics software is translated into more than 30 languages!
The WP-Stats plugin by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan Displays your WordPress blog statistics. Ranging from general to total statistics.
The StatPress Reloaded plugin by Manuel Grabowski shows you real time statistics about your blog. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.
Notable features of this plugin are…
- Once the plugin StatPress has been activated it immediately starts to collect information.
- You can see your visitors actions while they are surfing your blog or check which are the preferred pages, posts and categories.
- In the Dashboard menu you will find the StatPress Reloaded page where you could look up the statistics (overview or detailed).
- StatPress Reloaded also includes a widget you can add to a sidebar (or easy PHP code if you can’t use widgets!).
- StatPress can automatically delete older records to allow the insertion of newer records when your space is limited.
It also includes the following tranlations.
- English,
- Italian,
- Spanish,
- French,
- German,
- Russian,
- Norwegian,
- Dutch,
- Brazilian,
- Turkish,
- Swedish,
iRedlof Google Analytics Stats
The iRedlof Google Analytics Stats plugin by Rohit LalChandani is a wordpess admin panel plugin, that will allow you to manage everything from one place. This plugin is like wordpress .com stats plugin but the difference between the two is that wordpress.com stats works with wordpress analytics stats system and iRedlof GA Stats works with google analytics stats system.
Using this plugin, you get your GA stats straight from your account on google to your wordpress admin panel.
Right now this plugin is in development phase and only has limited features i.e. visits/day, pageviews/day,
To use this plugin you need google analytics account.
The Blog Stats by W3Counter plugin Integrates W3Counter’s free web stats service into your WordPress blog. This plugin adds a Blog Stats Dashboard to your admin area with real-time usage statistics for your blog.
These statistics include…
- the number of visitors and page views you’ve received over the past 7 days and all time,
- top viewed posts,
- top referrers,
- top searches
- and top visitor locations.
- It also adds a sidebar widget for integrating W3Counter’s tracking code into your theme.
Requires a free web stats account from W3Counter.com.
The Search Meter plugin by Bennett McElwee automatically records what people are searching for, and whether they are finding what they are looking for on your blog.
It keeps track of what people have been searching for in the last couple of days, week or month. It also shows you which searches have been unsuccessful. With Search Meter, you’ll be able to find out what people are searching for, and give them what they want by creating new posts on those topics.
The Popular Searches widget displays a configurable list of recent popular successful search terms on your blog, with each term hyperlinked to the actual search results. There’s also a Recent Searches widget, which simply displays the most recent searches.
Search Meter installs easily and requires no configuration. Just install it, activate it, and it starts tracking your visitors’ searches.
The Wp-visitors plugin by Gowtham records information about every visitor (page load). Requested URL, Referring URL, IP address, Hostname and Browser along with Date/Time and displayed in a tabular fashion. Geographical resolution of IP address (it’s only approximate) is also included.
The Feed Statistics Plugin by Christopher Finke tracks statistics for your RSS/Atom feeds, including the number of subscribers, which feed readers they’re using, which posts they’re viewing and which links they’re clicking on.
The plugin adds a “Feed” section to your WordPress administration panel. This section has four subsections: Feed (Options), Feed Readers, Post Views, and Clickthroughs.
The AddFreeStats Plugin by AddFreeStats will track how many people visit your WordPress blog, when they came, how they found your blog and much, much more… All AddFreeStats blog statistics reports are in real-time!
AddFreeStats.com also tracks Exit links and Google Adsense tracking clicks and where your visitors go after they leave your blog.
With AddfreeStats you can also check your blog stats on your mobile.
The Welcome To Your Data plugin by Adam Wulf makes it easy to track all of your statistics data from Google Analytics, Google Reader, Feedburner, and WP SlimStats in 1 easy to use plugin.
View all of your statistics inside your WordPress admin panel. Find correlations between data in Google Analytics, Fedburner, SlimStats, and Google Reader.
The GeneralStats plugin by Bernhard Riedl Counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, tags, link-categories, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages.
WordPress Google Analytics Reports
The WordPress Google Analytics Reports plugin by Imthiaz Rafiq brings the Google Analytics reports to your blog dashboard. Currently this plugin supports timeline and map overlay charts. The plugin is designed to help the blogger to see their blog traffic without logging into Analytics.
The Track MyBlogLog by Improving The Web identifies and tracks MyBlogLog readers on your website. The plugin will store the user avatar, location, website, twitter, technorati, etc.. along with the last visit dates.
Additionally, this plugin also has the ability to show a personalized message to the reader. This message can include the name of the user, the website, etc.
The Count per Day plugin by Tom Braider counts reads and visitors of your site.
Notable features of this plugin are…
- shows reads per page
- shows visitors today, yesterday, last week, last months and other statistics on dashboard
- you can show these statistics on frontend (e.g. on sidebar) too
- It counts 1 visit per IP per day. So any reload of the page don’t increment the counter.
It also includes the following translations.
- English,
- German,
- Italian,
- Portuguese,
- Belorussian
The CyStats plugin by Michael Weingaertner is a feature-rich statistics plugin that is integrated in the WordPress admin area.
Notable features of this plugin are…
- Bounce rate, ignore-by-cookie, ignore-by-ip/post-id/user_agent lists
- Hits, visits for day/week/month/year – human or robots
- Top refering pages
- Most read categories and tags
- Most read, most commented posts
- Most read feeds, number of feed visits today
- Internal/external search words
- Operating systems
- Daily, weekly, monthly and yearly statistics
- 404 error requests
- Browsers/clients/tools/…, w/o. version numbers
- Template tags for most read posts, user count,…
- Optional IP-anonymizing
- Multi language support (currently english, german supported).
- Optional tracking of admin area visits
I’m sure you found something in the list that will help you to keep track of your sites performance, and If you didn’t get time to check out all of these plugins, why don’t you bookmark this post and come back to it later.
This article had been a great read! I could not have explained things better myself.