I confess to being an ignoramus when it comes to tracking and statistics. All I’ve been content to do (since now) has been add the code to my pages and hit “Publish”. Well, if I’m going to earn any sort of passive income from my online endeavors, it is imperative that I understand that there needs to be a method to my ‘madness’, so to speak. What I really mean is that there needs to be: (i) a system in place for analyzing my statistics in order to optimize the sites either for better content, ad placement, et cetera. Currently, I’ve got code from Google Analytics, StatCounter and Woopra installed on both of my sites (fadingwhispers.org and Jane Talks Tech!). I’ve got a couple of other sites that aren’t being actively developed, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll use the two main sites as examples.
Of the three traffic analysis tools, I find Statcounter is the friendliest to use, but it is limited to 500 ‘entries’ so older data gets flushed. However, they do provide logs which, in my case, are somewhat useless because that a LOT of data to wade through.
Woopra is the newer kid on the block that I recently installed on both sites. The jury is still out on Woopra, but thus far, I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the accompanying Woopra desktop client which can show you live data on visitors! My site does not have that much traffic yet, but that is really icing on the cake. Check out the main dashboard for Woopra:
Google Analytics is the giants stats monster, in my book. It can be complicated to analyze and requires a Google account. Thankfully, there is the WordPress Reports plugin by TanTan which condenses the amount of information overload that I get from Google Analytics. On Habari, I use the Google Dashboard Module. That’s all for now. I’ll get around (hopefully) to posting relevant screenshots of the Google Analytics interface. Cheers!
