A few months ago I wrote about using Statcounter on a WordPress blog. I had originally hoped to find a plugin to help with this, but in the end I had to roll my own “plugin” to get the job done.
I’ve been using Statcounter to collect data on the usage of my blog/website for a little over a month now. It’s an awesome tool! The graph at the top of this article shows the number of pageloads (green), unique visitors (blue) and returning visitors (orange) over the last month or so. I had no idea this many folks were reading this crap. Get a life, people! 😉 Seriously, though… The traffic image above is just a nice graphic. The real value of Statcounter is the analysis tools they provide for your visitor log. My favorites are the “Popular Pages” and “Keyword Analysis” tools. Popular Pages shows your most-frequently accessed pages, duh. Keyword Analysis shows the search engine keywords that people are using to find your site and most importantly what pages they’re choosing to view.
In fact, the reason for this post is an analysis I ran this morning. A fair number of people are searching for “statcounter wordpress” and landing on one or the other of the two pages I mentioned in the first paragraph of this article. Further analysis of the Visitor Paths (another handy tool) shows that many of those people aren’t finding both of those articles. I’m hoping that this article will get a slightly higher page rank than the other two, and search engine users will more easily find the information they’re looking for.