WordPress 101

All 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, youll
probably want to see what kind of attention youre getting. WordPress offers help with their
Site Stats package. WordPress.com users will nd it as the Site Stats item in the Dashboard
menu. Self-hosted users will rst need to install the Jetpack plugin and activate Site Stats.
Once thats done, youll nd it under the Jetpack section. Youll also nd an option to display
an abbreviated stats box on your Dashboard screen - its 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 Congure
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 dont 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 theres only me, Ive just
checked the Administrator box. If you
are running a blog with multiple
contributors, you will want them to see
the reports. You dont 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 its showing how people nd 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. Its great
for a quick overview, but to see the
enhanced stats report, youll need
to go to WordPress.com. Click on
the Show Me button at the top of
the screen.
This is the overview screen displayed when you
rst arrive at WordPress.com.
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 todays 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 nd 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 youve
had from that country.
Clicking the hourglass icon for a specic post
displays a number of stats and averages over
time. At the bottom of the screen is a summary
dening the logic that generated these
numbers.
Last, but not least, is the New Years Annual
Report - an animated look at your blogs
activity in the year that just ended - and
with reworks too. Its 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 afliate 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 nd
you.
Resources
WordPress.coms 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 denise@moultriecreek.us.
Contact Info
Denise Barrett Olson
St. Augustine, Florida
http://moultriecreek.us
Twitter - @moultriecreek
Email - denise@moultriecreek.us