Jul 31, 2012 / General Advice & Pro Tips

Making Sense of Stats

Statistics get a lot of hype. They let us know that people are reading what we have to say. While it’s easy to focus on the numbers, site stats are about much more than how many people have visited your site.

Essentially, whenever someone loads your site, you’ve got a page hit. On WordPress.com, we use a small, smiley-face image that counts as a visit each time the icon is downloaded onto someone’s browser. Every time we record a site visit, WordPress.com also notes where the icon was downloaded (i.e. your home page or an individual post), any links that the visitor may click on, and where your visitor came from to help provide you with information about  your readers and how they got there.

Aside from knowing how site stats work, in what ways can they help us with our blogging? Looking at the bigger picture of your page hits can let you in on trends for your site, giving you a more holistic view of who’s visiting your site, when, and why. Generally, blog owners see a slight boost in page hits after publishing a new post, but using the summary tables link on your stats page shows you how your site’s traffic has been growing or shrinking over an extended period of time.

Through your referrers, you can see where people are finding your site, demonstrating what’s been successful for you and how to improve. For example, if most of your page hits are coming from an interesting article you wrote in the past, try revisiting the topic for a refresher to bring in new readers. If most of your visitors are coming through Facebook, make sure you have Publicize enabled so your posts are automatically shared on your Facebook profile. Use your stats information to glean any extra steps you can take to promote your site and your writing.

If you’re a total stats junkie, you can also set up Google Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools will let you know how many times your site has been included in search results, and exactly how many people have come to your site through search results (and which searches brought them to you).

Using site stats as a self-analyzing tool can generate new blogging goals, ideas, and even relationships as you see who’s been most active on your site. Ditching the numbers to focus on the trends is a great way to see the big picture and how far you’ve already come.

What do your site stats mean do you? Is it something you use to hone your blog’s focus? Or do you hardly look at them?

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    1. Hi maryshobbyhouse, I am quite new to blogging thats why I’m reading this post. I recently looked at my stats and realised a bit of a pattern. It helped me with figuring out the best days of the week to post and time of day to post. I also had a quick look at your blog and noticed some of your posts have lots of tags on them, have you checked after publishing that they are showing up in the reader? I noticed with my posts if i added many tags to a post sometimes they don’t end up on the reader at all! Less tags is sometimes better:) I hope this makes sense but that may get your views up a bit. All the best x

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  4. Deep envy for those with 200/day hits!

    Stats certainly can drive you crazy, but they are insightful and entertaining, too — I wonder about the number of hits I get from searches phrases like “flashlight face” and “what are the words to dead man come alive game?” that send people here: http://wp.me/p1UTwN-1n and here: http://wp.me/p1UTwN-5G respectively … whoda thunkit?

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  5. the only trouble with stats is you can start playing to the crowd as opposed to doing your own thing. Playing to the crowd can lead to mediocrity as you stifle your own creativity in order to pander to appreciation of others. Me? – I just go with the flow.

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  6. Erica – sorry I was waiting for a reply – could you please help direct me on the following comment I previously left on Aug 2nd?

    In this article, I read your link on “Publicize” and made the changes recommended in the settings on my WordPress site.

    It changed the whole appearance of my theme removing my header image, no side bars plus it duplicated the social networks I publicized in the posts where I had already added a plugin (Facebook, Twitter, Google+).

    How can I utilize this Publicize feature without changing the appearance of my site and duplicating these social networks?

    Thank you

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  8. Naive question regarding stats … do WP stats differentiate hits from “authors” (or those connected to the blog) from readers? If I check my own blog, are all my hits counted in the stat totals? I hope not cause we have a few authors and don’t want to track all of our own activity.

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    1. Your own page views don’t count on your blog – unless you have the post marked private, in which case when anyone who has been given access to the post (including yourself) views the page, the view is counted.

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  10. After reading this i am now always searching for that little smiley face on whatever page i’m on, it has become a game of where’s wally? Except with a smiley face.

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  12. Thank you for the information! I check my stats every now and then, but I never really put any thought to using them to cultivate my blog in the right direction. I hope to grow my blog. I understand that the key would be to as much as possible carve out a niche, although sometimes one can post articles that sort of deviate from time to time. Thank you!

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