Analytics is one of the most important tools you will ever be needing for your blog, be it a WordPress blog or any Blogger or Tumblr or any other blogs, as with analytics you will be able to study your traffic, and will know what to do to make your blog even popular and better. Analytics gives you a clear picture of your audience and their activities on your blog posts and pages, so that you can use that data to make things better for your audience and increase engagement on your blog more and more.
But for studying the analytics in a better way, you will need to have an idea of the best analytics services available and how to integrate them on your WordPress blog, so that you can start getting traffic data from your blog, and study them in an advanced way. Here are some services which you can use to study analytics in an advanced and good way for your blog,
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the best analytics services available on the internet, which provides world-class and professional quality traffic details to you for your blog. It is very easy to set up but it very powerful in both tracking your traffic data as well as presenting it in a professional and pleasing way, which helps to study the data in a better way.
With Google Analytics you can be assured that your traffic data is 99.9% accurate, as there might be some negligible losses in data due to failure of loading of the tracking script on your blog, but this error is very very much negligible, and you can always rely on Google.
The tracking code is really easy to install on your blog, you can just copy the code given by Google Analytics, to the header file of your blog, and its ready to track your traffic data immediately. If you are not comfortable with placing the tracking code manually on your WordPress blog, then there are some plugins to do that work for you. Some of them are,
You can install these above mentioned plugins and just provide your tracking ID (which will seem like UA-10182738, like this), which you can easily get from your Google Analytics dashboard, into the settings page of the plugins, and you will be ready to track your traffic data instantly.
Though by default, Google Analytics provides visitors data up to the previous day, i.e., if you are checking your data today, you will get your data up to yesterday, but you can always change this setting to get the data of the current day by selecting the current date in the date selection area.
Get Started with Google Analytics
Clicky
Clicky is another powerful tracking tool which you can use on your WordPress blog, and provides really advanced analytics like Google Analytics to you for your blog. You can get almost every feature of Google Analytics on Clicky, while there are some other additions as well.
The main thing that separates Clicky from Google Analytics is that it provides real time analytics for your blog, which means that you will get the current day’s traffic data automatically without having to set the current date in the date range choosing options, so that makes you updated with the latest traffic data of your blog, all the time.
Some of the additional features in Clicky that can be gained by paying some money are, big screen analytics that is suitable for offices, twitter analytics for measuring social activities, and many other. One thing that makes Google Analytics better is the integration of more than one blog in the same account for tracking analytics, without any fees, but in Clicky, you will have to pay some bucks for adding more than one blog to your Clicky account.
Installing Clicky on your WordPress blog is really easy as well, and like Google Analytics, it also offers plugins for directly installing the tracking code into your WordPress blog without having to paste a single line of code manually in your WordPress blog. The best plugin to do this job is,
This plugin not only adds the required piece of tracking code to your WordPress blog, but also ensures that you have a glimpse of your traffic data of your blog right in the Dashboard of your blog’s admin panel, so that you can always have a quick view of your site visitors while working on your blog. This plugin is recommended by Clicky.
StatCounter
StatCounter is another great tracking tool that lets you have your blog traffic data delivered to you in a simple and easy to understand way, without any complicated charts and graphs, and with a very simple interface.
StatCounter also provides powerful data like the above two tools, but not to much extent, and it focuses on being simple. But the main thing that sets this tool back from the other two is the accuracy of data tracked. StatCounter might show you bigger numbers than you actually should see, which means if you get around 100 visits a day to your blog, it might show you more than 200.
This is not at all a good thing, but still you can use this bug to help you out with your blogging. For example, if you are getting low visits on your blog and you are depressed about it, then you can see these higher visits and stay motivated on your course. So, in that way StatCounter might of pretty much use to you.
StatCounter can be installed on your site easily by pasting the given piece of code to your blog header file, and it’s good to go. Like the above two analytics tools, StatCounter also maintains the professional look of your blog, by providing you with an invisible tracking code, which leaves no branding mark on your blog anywhere.
Like I mentioned above, StatCounter is really simple and very easy to use, and people with very little or no knowledge about studying advanced graphs can also have a good look at the number of visits and pageviews from the control panel of his/her StatCounter account, as the data is represented in the form of simple bars with the value of data represented on top of each bar.
These were some of the best analytics tools for WordPress blogs, and also they are free to use, unless you choose to have a better plan by paying some bucks. I hope that this article will be of help to you in tracking your blog traffic flawlessly and with advanced metrics, but you are always welcomed to leave your comments below, so that we can also have some suggestions from you regarding this topic.
So, which analytics service are you using for your WordPress blog?
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Hey Rahul, thanks for sharing these tools. Tracking and analyzing activities on our blogs is crucial. I have been using Google Analytics and this has helped me a lot
Enstine Muki recently posted..How to make your blog popular : 10-week GamePlan review
Thanks for your appreciiton. But I recommend you to use two analytics programs to track your sites traffic activities. No analytics program is perfect in tracking. Some activities gets missed anyway. But using two analytics programs will help you to have a more transparent look at these stuffs.