Comments on: Who's reading?

Question: Who's reading?

pseudostrabismus — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:06:40 -0800

How can I juice up a foo.wordpress.com site? Specifically I want a better statcounter, but any other cool stuff you recommend would be nice, too.

I have a blog at nameofblog.wordpress.com. I'm planning to move it to nameofblog.com, but that's not high on my priority list at the moment. In the meantime, I'd like to know more about my stats, but I'm not sure which is the best free stat tracker for a Wordpress.com site. Right now all I see on the default tracker are pageviews, referring links, and the posts that get the most clicks. But those "most clicks" numbers only add up to about 20% of my daily pageviews, which... huh?

Specifically, I'd like to know:
How many people are following on RSS
Stats by city & country
Average length of visit
Any other stats you'd think I might find interesting.

All this stuff used to be easy to track on Blogger blogs with StatCounter, but I don't understand how to put a different stat tracker on Wordpress (I'm using the Contempt template, and I don't know how to edit CSS). Anyone have a suggestion of an easy, free way for me to satisfy my stats curiosity until I have time to customize the whole site? Ease of use is key, though- my knowledge of programming is scant, by which I mean I know maybe 10 HTML tags and that's about it.

While we're at it, I guess I'd also be interested in hearing about any Wordpress.com site goodies you know about that are cool & easy to use, but not widely known.
Thanks!

By: disillusioned

disillusioned — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:15:26 -0800

Seriously consider Clicky for stats tracking. It offers insanely powerful analytics, including everything you mention. It's just a JS link in the footer and you're set; you can hide the image so it just works quietly and happily.

By: jim.christian

jim.christian — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:33:06 -0800

I love Google Analytics (free). I use it on my personal WordPress-driven domain, and also have every single one of my clients hooked up through it.

By: Good Brain

Good Brain — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:51:39 -0800

Clicky and Google Analytics, and pretty much any other software that offers rich stats requires that you add custom javascript to your page. There is no option for adding javascript to wordpress.COM hosted blogs, unless you are paying $500+ for their VIP hosting. So the suggestions people are making aren't going to help you.

You could probably get city&country stats from some service that uses a tracking image and sitck it into a sidebar widget. That would also be able to estimate visit length.

If you want detailed stats with Wordpress, you'll need to get 3rd party hosting and install the software from wordpress.org

By: Pater Aletheias

Pater Aletheias — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:19:48 -0800

You can get city and country stats and average length of visit, plus quite a bit more, with a counter from StatCounter, which is free for their basic service. I just put the code in a text widget on my sidebar. It works fine.

By: Pater Aletheias

Pater Aletheias — Fri, 15 May 2009 23:54:11 -0800

Oh, I didn't notice that you used to use Statcounter--still, the same applies. If you were happy with it, it should be simple enough to add the code to a text widget.

By: pseudostrabismus

pseudostrabismus — Sat, 23 May 2009 16:08:48 -0800

Thanks, all- I added Clicky & Statcounter tracking image HTML codes into text widgets in my sidebar. They show up as narrow blank boxes, which are aesthetically acceptable to me (I was a little worried they'd look like banner ads or something, but they don't at all). I'm enjoying the new stream of information, which will totally do until I have a chance to self-host this baby.
Thanks!