Top Blog Statistics Trackers .

Top Blog Statistics Trackers

If you want to create a successful blog, it's important to understand where traffic to your blog is coming from and what people do when they visit your site. A number of trackers are available to bloggers to analyze the metrics of your blog and assist you in making decisions about your blog content.

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StatCounter

What We Like

Simple installation.
Stats can be public.
Free version available.
A 30-day trial of paid features.

What We Don't Like

The free version is severely limited.
No analysis of data conversion to sales and retention.

The advanced functionality of StatCounter is available for a fee, but most of the metrics a typical blogger needs are included in the free package. It's important to note that the free version of StatCounter only counts up to 100 visitors at a time before it resets and starts counting again. That means only the last 100 visitors to a website are included in the statistics displayed.

StatCounter generates activity alerts, descriptive information about your visitors while they visit, and the path they take to reach your site. The companion mobile apps let you take your stats with you wherever you go.

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Google Analytics

What We Like

Live results.
Lots of customizable settings.
Email alerts.
Mobile access.

What We Don't Like

Might be confusing to use.
The mobile app is limited.

Google Analytics has been around for a while and is considered one of the most comprehensive website tracking tools. Reports are available down to minuscule detail, and users can set up custom reports, which comes in handy for bloggers who like to track specific advertising campaigns. The basic Google Analytics service is available free of charge. Free Google Analytics apps are available to monitor your site's stats while you are on the go.

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AWStats

What We Like

Completely free.
Includes all the basics.
Shows bandwidth usage.

What We Don't Like

Basic user interface.
Limits new visits to 60 minutes.

Although AWStats isn't as user-friendly as some of the other analytics trackers, it is free and offers a good amount of metrics related to a blog's traffic. AWStats tracks the number of visitors, unique visitors, visit duration, and last visits. It identifies the most active days of the week and rush hours for your blog, as well as the search engines and searches phrases used to find your site.

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Clicky Real-Time Web Analytics

What We Like

Comprehensive results.
Modern user interface.
Affiliate program.
Pro versions are inexpensive.

What We Don't Like

Tracks 3,000 page views per day (more for pro accounts).
Missing features in the free edition.

Clicky provides real-time web analytics. The sleek interface presents reports that contain a high level of detail on every segment. Gather stats on each individual who visits your site. Users particularly like the graphic "heat maps" that show the density by visitors, segments, or pages.

Go to your blog and view on-site analytics on how many visitors are on the site and page you are viewing in real-time. Generate heat maps using the widget without leaving your blog.

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Matomo Analytics

What We Like

Free for self-hosting.
Real-time results.
Widget support.
Pageview-based payment system.

What We Don't Like

Results could be easier to read.
Slow to display large amounts of data.
It doesn't log the amount of time visitors spend on pages.

Matomo (formerly Piwik) comes in self-hosted and cloud-hosted versions. You can opt to install Matomo on your own server at no cost with the free version of the analytic software, or you can host your analytics on Motomo's cloud server. This fee-based version comes with a 30-day free trial.

With Motomo, you have full control and ownership of your data. The software is easy to use and customizable. If you need your analytics on the go, download the free Motomo Mobile app, which is available for both Android and iOS devices.

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Woopra

What We Like

High capacity free plan.
Clean and modern interface.
Heavy app integration.
Comprehensive trigger/action features.

What We Don't Like

Expensive non-free accounts.
Difficult to implement a tracking code.

For company blogs and websites, Woopra may be the best choice. With it, users can visualize every interaction with every visitor, down to the individual level, and it can be used to individualize customer service

Woopra prides itself on tracking anonymous visitors to your website from their first visit until they identify themselves, and beyond.

Woopra provides advanced analytics that include customer journeys, retention, trends, segmentation, and other insights. It provides real-time analytics, automation, and connections with other apps.

Understanding Blog Terms and Traffic Statistics

Using a blog statistic tracking tool, you can learn who is visiting your blog, what pages and posts they're looking at and how long they're staying on your blog. By analyzing your blog stats, you can determine where your promotion efforts are working, so you know where to increase your efforts and where to decrease your efforts. However, before you can make sense of your blog stats, you have to understand the terminology used by blog stat trackers.

Visits

The number of visits displayed in your blog stats shows the number of times anyone entered your blog during a given time period. Each entry is counted once.

Visitors

Visitors are harder to track than visits because unless users have to register to enter your blog, it is nearly impossible to not double-count repeat visitors. Even if a stat tracker uses cookies to determine whether or not a person who comes to your blog has been there before, it's highly possible that the person may have deleted their cookies since their last visit to your blog. That means the stat tracker would think the person is a new visitor and will count him or her again. With that in mind, visits are a more acceptable measurement tool for bloggers to determine the popularity of their blogs.

Hits

A hit is counted every time a file downloads from your blog. That means each time a page is accessed on your blog, every file that has to download on that page counts as a hit. For example, if a page on your blog includes your logo, an ad, and an image in your blog post, then you'll get four hits from that page — one for the page itself, one for the logo, one for the image, and one for the ad because each file has to download to the user's browser. With this in mind, hits are not used to determine the popularity of your blog since they are always much higher than actual traffic.

Page Views

Page views are the standard measurement of blog popularity and traffic in the blogosphere because that's the statistic online advertisers look at. Each visitor on your blog will view a certain number of pages during their visit. They might see one page then leave, or they might click on link after link viewing a variety of posts, pages and more. Each of the pages or posts that the visitor sees is considered a page view. Advertisers want to know how many page views a blog gets because each page view creates another opportunity for a consumer to see (and possibly click on) the advertiser's ads.

Referrers

Referrers are the other websites (and specific pages) online that are sending visitors to your blog. Referrers could be search engines, other sites that have linked to yours, other blogrolls, blog directories, links in comments, social bookmarks, links in forum discussions and more. Each link to your blog creates an entry point. By reviewing the referrers in your blog stats, you can find out which websites or blogs are sending the most traffic to your blog and focus your promotion efforts accordingly.

Keywords and Keyword Phrases

By reviewing the list of keywords and keyword phrases in your blog stats, you can learn what keywords people are typing into search engines that allow them to find your blog. You can focus on those keywords in future posts and advertising and promotional campaigns to further boost traffic to your blog.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate shows you what percentage of visitors are leaving your blog immediately after arriving at it. These are people who do not feel your blog is providing the content they're looking for. It's good to monitor where your bounce rate is particularly high and modify your marketing efforts around sites that are sending traffic that doesn't stay on your blog for more than a few seconds. Your goal is to create meaningful traffic and loyal readers, so adjust your marketing planaccordingly to focus on efforts that drive traffic with a lower bounce rate.

Anatomy of an RSS File

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a very easy XML language to learn because there are only a few tags that are required. And what's really great about RSS is that once you've got a feed up and running, it can be used all over the place. Most Web browsers can read RSS, as well as readers like Google Reader and Bloglines. RSS is a powerful tool for any Web developers who want to increase the visibility of their Web sites.

Tools Required to Write RSS

A text editor: You can use almost any editor that will generate plain ASCII text. I prefer to use jEdit because it's free and it checks the XML for me as I write. But you can also use HTML editors like Dreamweaver or BBEdit.
An RSS validator: If you use an XML editor like jEdit, an RSS validator isn't absolutely required. But I find that errors creep in even in the best editors, so validating the feed is always a good idea.

A Simple RSS Document

This RSS 2.0 document has one item in the feed along with the feed information. This is the minimum you need to have a valid and usable RSS feed.

 A Sample RSS 2.0 Feedhttp://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/

 An example of a simple RSS feed. This is the description of the feed itself, not an item.

 This is the most recent entry in my sample feedhttp://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/entry.html

 This is the text that will appear in the feedreaders. It describes the post itself, not the entire feed.

 http://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/entry.html

As you can see, a basic RSS document has very little required to create a fully functional feed. If you were to paste that code into an RSS validator, it would validate – which means that RSS feed readers could read it too.

The first three lines tell the user agent that this is an XML document, it's an RSS 2.0 file, and there is a channel:

The version information isn't required, but I find that it's a good idea to include that attribute on the tag.

Every feed should have a title, URL, and description. And that's what the

, and tags that live within the channel (but not within an ) define. For most feeds, these elements will never change once you've decided on your feed name and description.

A Sample RSS 2.0 Feed

http://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/ An example of a simple RSS feed. This is the description of the feed itself, not an item.

The last part of the feed are the items themselves. These are the stories that will be syndicated by your feed. Each item is enclosed in an element.

Inside the item you find the same three tags we already know:

, and . They perform the same function as they do outside the item tag, but inside they reference just that one item. So the text inside the is what displays in the feed reader, the title is the title of the post, and the link is where the post links to.

This is the most recent entry in my sample feed

http://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/entry.html This is the text that will appear in the feedreaders. It describes the post itself, not the entire feed.

The only new tag is the tag. This element tells the user agent or feed reader what the unique URL is for that post. This can be the same URL as the link or a separate permanent link (permalink) for the item.

http://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/entry.html

The only thing remaining is to close the item, the channel, and the rss. Because this is XML, all tags need to be closed.

Add New Items to the Top

Most RSS feeds consist of more than one item at a time. This way, if a customer is new to your site, they can see the last few posts, or all of them, if you keep them all in the RSS. To add a new post, just add a new item above the first post:

...

 A second posthttp://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/entry2.html

 Now my feed has 2 posts

 http://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/entry2.html

...

Additional Elements to Dress Up Your RSS Feed

The above RSS is all you need to create a feed, but there are a lot of optional tags that can help improve your feed and provide additional information to your readers. The following are some of my favorite optional tags that you can use to improve your RSS Feeds:

use this tag to tell the reader what language your feed is in. You can use standard language codes, or the language-country designation with country codes added on (like en-us for U.S. English).
- the copyright notice for your channel.
- the email address of the person responsible for the feed's content.
- an image of your feed's logo. This tag includes the sub-tags: ,,, , and .

Note, that the image

must match the channel

and the image dimensions cannot be larger than 144 pixels wide and 400 pixels tall.

All of the above tags go in the and describe the feed, rather than individual items, like this:

...

 A Sample RSS 2.0 Feedhttp://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/

 An example of a simple RSS feed. This is the description of the feed itself, not an item.

 en-us

 Copyright 2007, Jennifer Kyrnin

 webdesign@aboutguide.com (Jennifer Kyrnin)

 Lifewire.com

 http://0.tqn.com/f/lg/s11.gifhttp://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/

...

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