Tracking Visits Within WordPress

January 24, 2010

Welcome back to Search Engine Finesse. Since we have a full week of giveaways and many posts to whip out this week, today’s lesson is going to be a quicky. What we really need(ed) is to know if all our efforts and finessing is getting us any closer to the goal, right?

Recommended programs for tracking FEEDS and site VISITORS

You should have two things going on your blog already – feedburner integration, and analytics software. I recommend using Feedburner because it does all the formatting and delivering of your feed off-site – freeing up bandwidth, and brain cells. And google analytics I trust because, well, its THEM we’re trying to appease. There may be more thorough trackers, but GA suits our purposes for now. To set them up for the first time, get this Feedburner plugin, and this Google Analytics plugin. Register for accounts on both feedburner.com and Google.com/Analytics and complete the setup as instructed under Settings >> Feedburner Set up and Google Analytics tabs respectively.

Check your stats

THEN – you need to check whats going on with the stats. To be honest, running over to Feedburner or Google Analytics isn’t my first priority and I often forget to do it. Plugins, again, come to our rescue. If you are using the Google Analyticator plugin as mentioned above, you will have access to your stats immediately under the Dashboard. If you are using a different analytics integration, you will need this plugin:

Google Analytics Dashboard and for your feeds,
Feed Subscriber Stats.

Note: if your blog is fairly new or if you are a long-time blogger, stats are equally important. They tell us if we are meeting our GOALS. If you are a baby blogger, perhaps 50 new subscribers seems like a mountain? If you are a long-time blogger, perhaps some more optimization for search engines? Or are your feed readers clicking on anything? And what grabs their interest the most often?

——————————————————————————————————