Tracking user activity on a Wordpress blog

February 18, 2013 11:01 AM

Wordpress question: Is it possible to generate a report on which users are the most active on the site in terms of interactions, click-throughs, and time logged-in? I see a few plugins which claim to do this, but it seems like something you'd have had to have installed since the time you wanted to start keeping track. Is there something I can use which will find this information automatically?
posted by codacorolla to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Wordpress doesn't store this kind of information automatically. I'm afraid that the historical data won't be available to you.
posted by Magnakai at 11:14 AM on February 18, 2013

If you have Google Analytics already installed, you can pull together a lot of this info, but some things will still be guesswork. Unfortunately, tracking is not retroactive and what may already be pre-installed at the cpanel level (AWS stats, etc) will most likely be severely lacking.
posted by Wossname at 11:27 AM on February 18, 2013

WordPress, by default, doesn't provide for any kind of analytics or session tracking.

If you're hosted at WordPress.com the "jetpack" plugin stuff is automatically provided and does track some of the data you're looking for.

If you're self-hosted, you have to rely on software you or your hosting provider installs. Different hosts offer different levels of analytics by default, so you'll have to check out what they've provided for you. As Wossname indicates, most hosts' default web statistics offerings are pretty paltry (AWS Stats/Analog/webalizer), since they are just logfile based and aren't really analytics tools.
posted by maniactown at 12:43 PM on February 18, 2013

I actually just remembered that we've had this plugin, Audit Trail, installed for as long as the site's been active. It's installed to provide a framework for a home-brew plugin (which I didn't program), but I think it has a bit of the raw data that I would need. The problem is that I don't know how to program very well, and I also don't know SQL... so I'm not sure how I would go about getting reports off of this plugin. This isn't an immediate concern, but I feel like it's something that's going to become more important.
posted by codacorolla at 12:44 PM on February 18, 2013

I'm sure you've found this in the meantime, but if it's installed correctly, it provides a Manage/Audit Trail page to view the recorded logs. If you aren't seeing it, it's likely you haven't been granted access. You would need to be either upgraded to Administrator status, or have the appropriate permissions granted through Role Scoper.
posted by Magnakai at 8:20 AM on February 25, 2013

Yep, I found the page, but there are thousands and thousands of interactions. Would it be possible to pull the whole log out of our database to run queries on it?
posted by codacorolla at 1:02 PM on February 25, 2013