BloggingAmigos

Burger King knew what it was doing when it came up with the ad campaign, “Have it your way.” That’s all people really want; a burger that fits their needs, well, I guess with the exception of those who don’t eat hamburgers. Anyway, statistics plugins and packages are the same way. They won’t necessarily customize themselves for you, but there’s a wide enough variety of options that should allow you to have it your way.

Before you just grab something and install it, which is OK if you’re willing to do a lot of experimenting, you might want to do a little research first. What exactly do you want? Here are a few thing I would consider:

• Cost - This seems like a no-brainer to me, but I always look for the free tools. Depending on your application though, you might want to find something “extra” professional.
• Longevity - How long will your stats be available? Are only the last X hits available? Does your data accumulate for as long as you use it? In this case most people would prefer to see trends over time. Yes, it is nice to see what’s happened in the last 100 hits, but what if you receive 125 hits/day? You’ll never be able to compare your numbers to yesterday or last week or last month unless you manually keep track of your data. That would be a lot of work
• Data Types - What kind of information are you getting? You should be able to track hits, time, browser, and referring links. Some packages will give you more information like pages visited, language, ISP, location of visitor, search engines, keywords, entrance pages, and exit pages. Do you really need all of that? Are you interested in some of that? Something to think about if you have to choose between a few.
• Tying Data Together - It’s nice knowing where your hits came from, what referring links were clicked, and what pages were visited. It can also be nice to be able to track all of that information by a single visit.
• Readability - Like everything else, how easy you can use a product can affect how often you use it and how happy you are. If your stats application has a lot of data but you can’t decipher any of it, you might want to find something else.

I know I don’t need to sing the praises of the great and powerful Oz, I mean Google. That just happens to be what I’m currently using for all of my Wordpress blogs. Google Analytics is free, it’s easy to setup, it lasts forever and I get a wide variety of data. I wouldn’t even begin to say that I understand all the ins and outs of it, but I’m learning. All you need is a Google/GMail account and you’re good to go. You can also share these stats with any other Google account. This can be handy if you personally have several accounts and want to see your stats from all logins, or if you have a joint blog with several friends/colleagues.

There is also a quick and easy Wordpress plugin called Google Analytics for Wordpress. After downloading and installing, you just need to tell it your account number. If you’d like to read more about this plugin I have a more extensive review here.