Blog Traffic Plugins
The LSC web team has installed various plugins to the WordPress blogging site. Most of these can be very useful depending on your blogging intention. One plug-in that you don’t need to activate is the “List-All” item that will create a list of all blogs on a WPMU (WordPress Multi-User) site. That plug-in was needed for site management, but not for individual blog management.
The first two I’ll talk about have to do with monitoring the amount of traffic to your site. Most bloggers want to know whether anyone is reading their stuff. This requires some sort of stats or analytics monitoring. For someone who already uses the free Google Analytics service, you can easily activate Google Analytics on your LSC blog by activating the plugin and then following the very simple on-screen directions.
For the less geeky (not already a Google Analytics user), you might just want to activate the Fire Stats plugin which will give you a viewer report right on the blog dashboard. It will tell you the number of unique hits, total hits, unique hits in last 24 hours, where the viewers came from (referrer link), most popular pages, browsers used, operating systems used, a “Hits Table” with much more detail about the blog readers.
On your dashboard, click on the Plugins tab. All available plugins are NOT active by default. Click the Activate link for any that you want to use.
January 19th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
I’m trying to install Google Analytics onto the blog I’ve put together. I can’t figure out where to paste the UA script. I tried editing one of my posts and pasting it at the bottom of the HTML code—didn’t work. Help!
January 20th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Hi Susan,
Looks like you were able to import your blog from that other site. You’ll have to let me know how easy that was. It looks great.
The beauty of using the Google Analytics plug-in is that you don’t have to paste any code into the template or anything geeky like that.
If you have an account at Google Analytics, just add the URL for your LSC blog to your Google account. Then come back here and go to the Plugins tab on your dashboard and activate the Google Analytics plug-in. It inserts the code for you. Very soon thereafter you will see that Google Analytics is tracking the activity on your blog.
Good luck, Barry
January 22nd, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Google Analytics is really fun—thanks!
Moving the blog was super-easy. I just exported out of the old blog and imported into the new one. Nearly everything moved perfectly.
Next I’ll email all the folks from last year’s May conference to let them know of the blog move and figure out how to delete the old blog….or I guess I could just let it die a slow death…
March 7th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
If you have a blog Susan just search on Google for Google Analytics Wordpress Plugin. There are several free ones out there that do an amazing job.
February 21st, 2008 at 11:25 am
Google Analytics is very nice. If you havent tried statcounter check it out . I tend to be a freak when it comes to gathering data and stat counter suits me best.
Thanks,
Tim
October 22nd, 2008 at 3:06 pm
I’ve used google analytics plugin but never tried fire stats. I had problems embedding the code into blog hosted on wordpress.com. Is there anyway I can enable google analytics on wp.com?