While it scares me to start talking about checking stats …  it is a necessary thing to do.

Statistics can be a super helpful thing in refining your site and providing people the information they want to know. Statistics can also be a huge time suck and a non money making activity depending on how you use them.

What are the important stats to check?

I think it’s important to talk about exactly WHICH stats I’m talking about when I say let’s check stats. I am NOT talking about obsessively checking unique visitors or pageviews. I am talking about checking keywords people are using to find your site. What page they are landing on for that keyword, and where they are coming from.

Yes, of course it’s nice to check your uniques and pageviews, but they really aren’t going to give you any information about how you can improve your site.  So let’s make a pledge to work with the stats that will help us move forward and help our site grow ~ and even those don’t need to be checked every day.

How do I track stats?

When tracking stats you will need a program or a plugin that will capture information from your site and put it in a manner you can read and learn from. There are a few options when it comes to what you use to track stats. Here are a few options I’ve used and the one I use now.

Google Analytics

The biggest and possibly most popular is Google Analytics. Analytics is very in depth and powerful. It tracks many many metrics of your site. You can easily grab the code and install it on your site.

Here’s my problem with Google Analytics. It’s so big and collects so much data I find it seriously confusing and can never find what I am looking for. I also have a little bit of “google paranoia” so I don’t really like having google’s nose in all my sites.

I do not use Google analytics on most of my sites. Because I don’t like wasting time trying to find my way around there.

WordPress Stats Plugin

For  a long time I used the wordpress stats plugin. It gives you a lot of good information. It provides this information right on the dashboard of wordpress which is very handy. I like that it shows you the keywords people are using to find your site, and you don’t have to hunt down the info. It’s right there every time you log in.

For a niche blog the wordpress stats plugin is a pretty good option. It will give you the basic information you need as a blogger in a concise, simple and easy way.

You can download the wordpress stats plugin here. Once you’ve downloaded it you will have to upload and install it just like any other plugin. You can use the dashboard uploader or open the zip file and use FTP.  Once you have the plugin uploaded and activated you will need your API key to make it work ~ the one you used for Akistmet.

Statcounter.com

This is the service I use most now. It is a free service. It will analyze your stats and I find the interface very easy to use.  You can add as many sites as you want to your account and you will able to see your stats for all your sites on one page. This is very handy for quick glances of traffic. You can dig into to any site at the click of a button and check keywords, where they’re coming from, most used keywords and much more.

To make it possible for statcounter to count your stats you have to install a piece of code into your site. This isn’t too complicated and I’ll walk you through it. If you don’t feel comfortable with this, then I suggest you use the wordpress stats plugin, no code involved there.

Installing Statcounter:

1. Create an account at statcounter.com and log in.

2. Click add a new project. (this will start the process of you creating the code to put on your site)

3. Fill in the form on the next page.

• website title ~ I use the website address or keywords here so I can keep track
• website url ~ the domain name of your site ie. www.mountainbikeforsale.net
• Category ~ pick one ~ it doesn’t show up anywhere. I usually pick business since this is a business
• Time Zone ~ choose your time zone here
• Visit Length ~ this counts unique visitors, I set mine at 6 hours
• IP blocking ~ this blocks statcounter from counting this IP address, I usually copy and paste my IP address so it doesn’t count my visits. It provides YOUR IP address on the left hand side
• Public stats ~ leave that one unchecked, unless you want everyone to be able to see your stats
• click next to go to the next step

4. Configure and Install Code

Click the big blue arrow to go to the next page.

5. Choose the statcounter you want

I choose invisible, this way it doesn’t show up on my site and I am the only one that can see them. Then click next.

6. Installation options

Leave the default as is, and then click next.

7. Grab your code to install.

The next page gives you a block of code. You are going to need to highlight it and then copy it. But first make sure you are logged into the site you are going to put the code on. You want to go to your dashboard (wordpress) and then go to the “appearance” category. On the right hand side you will see a bunch of options. You want to choose the “footer” option. This will take you to the code that makes the footer (bottom area) of your site look the way it does.

Once you click on “footer” you will open up the code for your footer. Depending on what theme you have chosen there may be a lot of code or only a little code. You want to go near the end of the code and look for this piece of code </body>. When you find that you want to paste your tracking code right BEFORE it.

This video will walk you through doing that:

Once you’ve pasted your code in you want to click the save or update button so your changes to this code will be saved. That’s it. You’ve installed your statcounter code!

Fixes for things that go wrong.

• There’s no </body> tag in your footer area.

In this instance instead of putting your code in the footer you can go to the appearance category and choose widget instead. You will want to scroll through and find a “text” widget. Drag it over to the sidebar are and then open it and paste your code in there instead.

This is also an alternative if messing around in code is just too overwhelming for you. It will work just as well as the footer. If you do this, do not put a heading in the widget, just leave it blank. You will have to remember that widget is your stat code and leave it alone.

• Your statcounter isn’t counting

Make sure you have your code installed correctly ~ you’ve gotten ALL the code they provided, and it’s BEFORE the </body> tag. Also make sure you haven’t changed your theme. If you change your theme you have to reinstall your statcounter code.

Those are the two big things I can see happening, if you run into any other problems feel free to ask me about them in the comment section. I’ll do my best to help you out!

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3. Choosing Your Blog Settings and Theme
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