Reading Blog Feed Stats


Reading Blog & Feed Stats

The Blog and Feed Stats sections of the WordPress.com Dashboard allow you to discover how many visitors have accessed your blog, how they reached your blog, which posts are most popular, and how well your RSS feed is used. The statistics don't include visits you make to your own blog while you're logged in.

You can find more information about WordPress.com statistics at: faq.wordpress.com.

This panel is not available if you installed WordPress on your own server, but you can gather similar information by installing plugins or visiting the statistics section of your server's Control Panel, if you have one. We discuss plugins, including the WP-Shortstat plugin, in Chapter 7.

Once you know how many visitors you have, how they found you, and which posts are most popular you can use that data to improve your blog to better meet both your own objectives and the interests of your audience.

To read Blog Stats

1.

Log in to your WordPress.com Dashboard.

2.

Click on Blog Stats in the second row of buttons. After a few moments the Blog Stats page is displayed (Figures 57, 58 and 59):

  • Last 30 days: the line graph shows how many people visited your blog over the last 30 days. The y-axis shows the number of visitors. The dates for the last 30 days are displayed on the x-axis. You can quickly see which days your blog received most visits. Hover over the various points on the line to see a tooltip displaying the number of views that point represents.

  • Referrers: visitors arrived at your blog by clicking links on these sites. Click the link on the word Referrers to see more detail for the last 7 days.

  • Top Posts: this is a list of the most visited posts. Click the link on the phrase Top Posts to see more detail for the last 7 days.

  • Search Engine Terms: Visitors arrived at your blog after searching on these terms. Click the link on the phrase Search Engine Terms to see more detail for the last 7 days.

Figure 57. Our test blog at WordPress.com has not been very popular. There was an all-time high of 6 views about a month before viewing this chart.


Figures 58 & 59. Our secret test blog at WordPress.com has just been set up (top). No-one has visited so we have no Referrers, no Top Posts and no Search Engine Terms. Once word starts getting out (bottom) we have a Referrer and some Top Posts, but still no Search Engine Terms as yet.


Tips

  • The Stats pages require the Macromedia Flash Player plugin. If you do not have it already installed, your browser should prompt you to install it. For additional help visit www.macromedia.com/support/flashplayer.

  • In the Top Posts detail page click the links for a summary of the last 7 days or the last 30 days to see a ranked listing of top posts for that period.


To read Feed Stats

1.

Log in to your WordPress.com Dashboard.

2.

Click on Feed Stats in the second row of buttons. After a few moments the Feed Stats page is displayed (Figures 60 and 61).

  • Last 30 days: the line graph shows how many people accessed your blog's feed over the last 30 days. The y-axis shows the number of readers. The dates for the last 30 days are displayed on the x-axis. You can quickly see which days your feed had most readers. Hover over the various points on the line to see a tooltip displaying the number of readers that point represents.

  • Feed Readers: the pie graph shows the feedreaders, also called aggregators, that accessed your feed in the previous day. Hover over the various slices of the pie to see a tooltip displaying the percentage numbers.

Figure 60. Our test blog at WordPress.com now has about 6 people subscribed to the RSS Feed.


Figure 61. 16.7% of our feed audience used Feedster to read the feed, while others used web browsers, NewsGatorOnline, and other methods.


Tips

  • The Stats pages require the Macromedia Flash Player plugin. If you do not have it already installed, your browser should prompt you to install it. For additional help visit www.macromedia.com/support/flashplayer.

  • Feed statistics are like magazine circulation numbers: one magazine does not necessarily equal one reader: magazines are often passed around or read by many people in waiting rooms. A feed may be read by one person using their own feed reader such as NetNewsWire or FeedDemon, or it may be acquired by an aggregator, such as Newsgator Online, and then read by dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people.

  • Web browsers have differing capabilities. The tooltips may not appear if your browser is unable to display them.





WordPress 2. Visual QuickStart Guide
WordPress 2
ISBN: 0321450191
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 142

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