How to Install and Use the Wordpress.com Stats Plugin to Monitor your site’s daily Visitors.
Get the Keywords each visitor uses to find your site, discover where they come from, see the Clicks they use to exit, monitor your most popular Pages and Posts and a load more besides.
The Stats plugin is actually supplied by Wordpress.com as a service to all Wordpress users and you can use this service to collect statistics on your self-hosted Wordpress Blogs and Websites as well.
The data is collected for you by Wordpress so there is no impact on the bandwidth or storage capacity of your site, wherever it is hosted. To quote Wordpress they say that “it’s one of the fastest stats systems hosted or not that you can use“.
The WP Stats plugin is easy to setup and once configured you will be able to collect very valuable daily data about your site, which you can monitor and analyze to see how your Wordpress site is performing.
Analysis of the data provided is essential if you want to be aware of what exactly is happening with your site from a visitor’s perspective and it can help you determine the direction your site takes to more fully exploit the visitor traffic you are already getting.
It is also great for SEO and seeing what keyword search terms are being entered before visitors click through to your site.
Here’s what you must do to get the Wordpress.com STATS plugin installed and working to collect this information about your site:
Find and Install the Wordpress.com Stats Plugin
To get the wp stats plugin all you need to do is visit the WordPress Plugin Directory and search for the Wordpress.com STATS plugin. Alternatively via 2.7 you can use the new Plugin Browser/Installer facility to search for and install it from within the WP dashboard.
If you are having problems finding it you can download it from this link:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/
If you are doing this manually the when you have the zipped plugin folder just unzip it and ftp the folder to the plugins directory at your site. If you don’t know where this is or how to do this checkout Installing Wordpress Plugins.
After installing and activating the Stats plugin you will see that there is another very important step for you to complete…
Click on the Wordpress.com Stats link above and the message below will be displayed…
Use your API KEY to Link Your Site to your Wordpress.com Account
You will need to use the AKI key associated with you Wordpress.com account in order to get the wp Stats plugin working.
This is the same API key that you need to setup the Akismet spam protection plugin.
If you do not have an account just go to Wordpress.com and sign up for a Free account – it’s easy!
To find out how to get your API Key from Wordpress dot com, just use the link to the post below for a full explanation:
How To Get Your Wordpress API Key
After you have obtained your API Key you will need to enter into the required field above to complete the configuration of the plugin.
Then click SAVE and you should see the following message displayed:
And as it says you should visit your Wordpress admin dashboard to view your stats. However, because you have only just installed the plugin there has not yet been any time to gather any stats info yet, so right after you install the plugin there will be no statistics to display and you will see this other very helpful message!
Just wait a while and as visitors come to your site your stats will start to be recorded and then you will have something to look at.
Checkout my next post for more information on the data that is recorded by the WP Stats plugin and what it means and what you should do with it.
It is all very interesting stuff, but most important it is an extremely useful tool for developing your site to get more visitors and to improve your site’s SEO to target the keywords you want to rank for.
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