The Geeky Guide to WordPress – Understanding your Stats

As I’ve been doing this blogging thing a little while now and it seemed a good idea to pass on a few of the things that I’ve learned over the five years that I’ve been doing this. In easy and often geeky steps you’ll be taken through the steps and point out the pitfalls of taking your blog seed and growing it into something really amazing.

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Every new blogger at some points looks to the the stats page and wonders… What the hell does this all mean? Let me do my best to help, I say I’ll do my best becasue some things I will be honest still confuse me.

Traffic

Looking at the traffic tab we can see a nice graph with hopefully lots of views, or maybe not. It doesn’t matter. The bar chart is showing you the views your page has received on that day in the light blue and the dark blue shows the number of visitors. The visitors display can be turned off to just show the views with a tick box at the top right.

The day highlighted can be changed by choosing another day and at the bottom will breakdown the day into views, visitors, likes and comments by the numbers.

 

Scroll down and there’s more:

Posts and pages shows where the views have gone to how many views per post / page.

Referrers shows where the views have come from – i.e. the WordPress reader, Twitter etc..

Countries shows a breakdown of the views according to the country they’re in.

 

Even further down where I havent shown are the search terms that were used to find your content, Authors (if there are more than one on your blog) and links where others have linked to your posts or pages.

These statistics are a powerful tool, It’s showing you what’s being viewed, where they’re viewing it from and how many are viewing your content and gives a guide for how many views there are per visitor. For those that are trying to get their message out it’s giving the information to help with your blogging strategy.

For everyone else, yeah this is cool.

 

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Insights

If we now look at the insights tab we get a whole new level of information:

We’ve now got information on blogging activity, all time views, followers, commentors. There’s a list of total number of posts, visitors, likes and lots more… I think I remember coming up with something there wasn’t a stat for once but I can’t remember what that was and I don’t think it was that important.

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It takes a while to work out what all the stats mean and maybe even longer to work out how to use them to your advantage. For myself and maybe other bloggers this is really a look see to what’s going on and sometimes when things aren’t right or to work out really when is best to post. For me the key thing I worked out from this is that posting on a weekend gets you very few initial views and Sunday is a dead day.

But I also worked out that the US is a big source of views, if you want to target this hot bed of traffic then for me in the UK it’s best to post later, or if I want bloggers in the UK to see these posts then I have time time it with lunch hours, evening after dinner or such like.

What about you bloggies? What have you learned from your stats or what still eludes you?

Planet Simon

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