Jetpack Stats provides data, graphs, and charts to show you how many visits your site gets, which posts and pages are the most popular, and much more. This guide explains how to read and understand your site’s stats and insights.
In this guide
Video Transcript
Hi everyone; it’s Mike Bal from WordPress.com. Today we’re gonna dive in and look at site stats. I get really excited about this stuff. I have a kind of marketing slash optimization background for websites and doing a lot of this and kind of helping people that I work with achieve their different goals. So I get really excited when I could see how many people are coming to a site and what they’re doing.
And this can kind of inform you as well in terms of, like, are your strategies working? Are people enjoying the content that you’re writing? Which content is performing best? Can you create more of that content?
So right now, I went to WordPress.com, and I went ahead and selected the Han Solo project site. Since that one’s, it’s a live site for my band, which is not very popular. So the stats are gonna be a little embarrassing, but it’s at least a live site that exists in the wild and should have some numbers on it.
So on the left-hand sidebar, if I go down here, you’ll see that there’s a section dedicated for stats. And these stats are built into Jetpack, which is a tool or platform that we own and have integrated into our product. You might use other analytics tools as well, but these are kind of built-in to track on the product from day one. So when you launch your site, you have them ready to go, and you can always go back and kind of compare. All the different analytics tools do track differently. So sometimes your numbers might line up, and there’s articles out there about why that is, but this is a good reference that’s kind of built-in.
So if we go through here, we have, you can see that it’s set to traffic. There’s also an insights option. And then over here is the kind of timeframe you’re looking at. So right now, it’s looking day by day. I might want to look at weeks or months, and we’ll see what kind of info we have in there.
So you can see June is when I moved the site over to wordpress.com, and that’s when my stats kind of start. I go back to weeks, I can get kind of a full view.
So we’ll check that out. Right now, it has this week selected for April 25th, and it’s telling me one view, one visitor, which is kind of embarrassing, but we haven’t put any new music out for a while, so that’s on us. Now, if we go down a little bit, you’re gonna get that breakdown.
Now, WordPress.com has likes and comments built in, so that’ll be tracked as well.
And then you’re gonna get more insights on the types of content you have in here. So this has posts and pages. It’ll tell you which pages are getting any kind of activity. It’ll tell you if people are coming from search and what they search for to get there. It’ll tell you if any sites are sending traffic your way. And then it’ll also tell you where in the world people are coming from.
If you switch over to Insights, you’ll kind of get some different kind of information that you can use to inform, again, your strategy or your content. So this is kind of like a heat map for when I’m being viewed based on months. You can average per day. You kind of look at that breakdown over time. I haven’t published any new content. We haven’t put out any new music for a while. So that’s what this is telling me. I probably should have done that.
And then you get a nice breakdown of all your content across your site and kind of your historical views and visitors. So views are when somebody just comes to your site and sees a page. Visitors are, as far as we can tell, different people. So one person might come back to your site 100 times, so you could have 100 views but only one visitor. This is pretty distributed, so I know that there’s a good amount of people coming, and they’re not always coming back, but a few of them have come several times.
Don’t have a ton of followers on WordPress.com, but it has social follows integrated, which is cool.
And then you can see down here, I have this Publicize service, which is basically a marketing tool we have set up in the platform, set up with a Facebook account and the page for this project or whatever.
So like I said, you can come in here; you can get general ideas about your traffic, where they’re coming from, what your top content is, even what your top authors are if you have multiple authors. If you have videos uploaded and things like that, you can get some basic stats as well.
So that’s really cool stuff that you can kind of learn to just check every now and then and go back and see if there’s anything that stands out, right? Like I might go back to March 31st here and see why I got more views or visits that specific day. I think we had a launch for full site editing around that time, and maybe I use this site for some of the demo content, so it’s probably mostly people at Automattic, but hopefully, we’ll get some new music soon and we’ll see these stats go up.
If you have any questions about different stats or metrics that you look at or what you could look at, go ahead and drop them in the comments. We’ll get back to you. Like I said, I really nerd out about this stuff, and I’ve done some more complicated analytics tracking implementations to really get insights on what’s happening on your site. So happy to talk that through.
To access your website or blog’s stats page, take the following steps:
The Traffic tab shares data about the activity and behavior of your site’s visitors. Each section of the Traffic page is explained in detail below.
Stats are tracked by a pixel that loads in the visitor’s browser and records site traffic. Stats show you a larger trend of user traffic rather than an exact head count. The following traffic will not reflect in your stats:
- Visits from browsers that do not execute JavaScript or load images, or are blocking the stats pixel in some way.
- Visits from Googlebot and other search engine crawlers.
- Visits you and other team members make to your own publicly available site while logged into your WordPress.com account.
- If your site is set to private, views by you and other logged-in members of your site are counted.
- Plugin-enabled sites can control which user views will be counted in your stats for private sites by going to Jetpack → Dashboard → Settings → Traffic → Site Stats.
Free access to Jetpack Stats is for personal, non-commercial sites only.
Personal sites have the option to upgrade to a paid subscription. If you get value from Jetpack Stats, feel free to pay any amount to unlock upcoming advanced features and priority support, if applicable.
Commercial sites require a paid subscription. We define a commercial site as one that you aim to make money from. This could be through advertising or affiliate links, selling products or services, soliciting donations or sponsorships, or any other means directly related to a for-profit business or educational organization.
The paid subscription unlocks priority support and access to upcoming advanced features. For the remainder of 2023, commercial sites will be charged at the lowest tier, $10 per month. Starting in 2024, we will introduce metered billing based on site traffic.
Please note that non-compliance with these terms can result in immediate suspension of services without notice. It is essential for you to correctly identify if your site is personal or commercial, and select the appropriate plan.
7-day highlights is a snapshot of recent traffic to your site. It will show visitors, views, likes, and comments compared to the previous seven days. You can switch to a 30-day snapshot by clicking the three-dot menu in the upper right corner of this panel.
The two main units of traffic measurement are views and visitors:
- A visitor is an individual looking at your site. Their visit is counted the first time we recognize their browser in a selected time frame.
- A view is counted when a visitor loads or reloads any page of your site.
A visitor can view your site’s many pages or the same page multiple times. Therefore, the views number is typically higher than the visitors number. You may also notice that your visitor count lags behind your views count. This is due to the way we process the numbers. Typically, a view is reported within five minutes. However, it can take up to two hours for new visitors to show up in your stats.
In the graph, you can display information per day, week, month, or year. Click on any bar in the graph to view the stats for this time period. Hover your mouse over any bar in the graph to see the Views Per Visitor, which shows the average number of views each visitor made.
The unique weekly visitors can sometimes be less than the sum of daily visitors for the same week. The same goes for unique weekly visitors being less than your total monthly visitors, and so on. This occurs when the same visitor appears multiple times during the week or month.
The Traffic chart also includes tabs for viewing stats for the number of likes and comments on your site. Click on the Likes or Comments boxes to display a bar chart for those stats.
The number of likes may be greater than the number of views if your readers liked a post without visiting your site. For example, if they liked your post from the Reader or their email.
This section of Stats will list the Posts and Pages that have received the most views in the time period you’ve specified at the top of the page.
A view is counted for a post or page when the direct link of the page/post is visited, or the full post is viewed in the Reader.
The Home page / Archives entry includes views of:
- Your site’s homepage.
- Archives including category, tag, author, and date-based (posts by month and year) pages.
- Your posts page, if you have one for your site.
- Your shop page using WooCommerce.
Some blog layouts display the full post text on the homepage. If a visitor reads a post on your site’s home page, the view will be counted for the homepage, not the post.
The referrers section lists other blogs, websites, and search engines that link to your site.
A view is associated with a referrer if a visitor lands on a page on your site after clicking a link on the referrer’s site.
If you see a down arrow next to a referrer, you can click on the arrow to see more specific details. For example, expanding Search Engines will show details for specific search engine referrers (Google, Bing, and more.)
The number of referrers may not match the number of total views. Not all visitors will land on your site by clicking a link somewhere else. Visitors may type your URL directly into the web browser, click a link in an email, or click a link in another application, which then loads the site.
Mark a Referrer as Spam
You can mark certain referral sources as spam to remove that referrer from displaying in your stats. The referrer link will go into your personal spam referrer block list and won’t show up in the future. It doesn’t stop traffic coming to your site from these sources, but you may not want to see them in your stats.
To mark a referrer as spam:
- Go to your Stats page.
- Hover over the referrer and click the warning symbol next to it.
- Click Mark as Spam.
Some trusted sources cannot be marked as a spam referrer.
If you change your mind immediately, you can click the warning icon again to immediately undo the mark as spam option. However, you cannot undo the action once you have navigated away from the Stats page. If you have accidentally marked a referrer as spam and cannot undo the change, please contact us. We can help with this.
You can see how many views your site has received per country by the day, week, month, quarter, year, and all time. Click the “View all” link at the bottom of the Countries section to see views by country on a larger map.
If we cannot determine your visitor’s location, their visit will not be included in the Countries view. Not all visitors who visit your site will have their location enabled in their browsers. Some visitors might access your site through an incognito browser or a Virtual Private Network (VPN).
This stat will let you see how much traffic each author has generated, which can be helpful if your site has multiple users. Clicking on a name will reveal each author’s most popular posts, pages, and the number of views each has attracted.
All your site’s users can see the stats: Administrators, Editors, Authors, and Contributors. If your site is plugin-enabled, you can go to Tools → Marketing → Traffic → Site Stats and choose which user roles can see Stats.
People used these terms, words, and phrases on search engines (like Google, Yahoo, or Bing) to find posts and pages on your website.
For additional insight into search traffic to your site, we recommend connecting to Google Search Console.
This stat counts the number of times your readers have clicked on external links that appear on your site. These may be (but are not limited to):
- Links you add to your post and page content.
- Links placed in comments by your readers.
- Links attached to the names of users who comment on your site.
- Links to media files.
- Links to images in a gallery.
The Videos section tracks views on the videos uploaded to your site. You can click on the title of any video to view a chart showing daily activity for that video and a list of the places on your site where the video has been embedded.
Click on View details to see the following details for each video:
- Impressions: The number of times a video was loaded on a page.
- Hours Watched: The total number of hours that the video has been watched by all viewers.
- Views: Views are counted when a visitor clicks the play button on the video player.
This section displays information about emails sent to your subscribers for blog posts you have published. It included the number of emails opened and how many readers clicked a link in the email to visit your site.
Click the subject/title of an email to visit Email opens stats with the number of recipients, number of emails opened, and the calculated open rate. Scroll down to access details about location, devices, and email clients for that email.
While in the Email opens section, you can click on the Highlights tab for general information about the post and the Email clicks tab for activity about the clicks on the content of your email.
This section lists the files your site’s visitors have downloaded from your site and how many times they have been retrieved. Downloads are counted for uploaded video, audio, and document file types.
Take into account that every file request is recorded in your stats. The download count also increases when the file is opened directly in the browser or the download has not finished. Your own requests are also recorded.
Be aware that many podcast apps download files automatically for podcast audio files. A download does not necessarily mean that the podcast has been played.
File Download Stats are currently unavailable for sites using third-party plugins or themes.
The second tab, after Traffic, is Insights. Your Insights page includes an overview of your site’s stats so that you can view and learn from long-term trends.
The Insights screen shows the following information:
- Year in review: The number of posts, words, likes, comments and subscribers your site has so far this year.
- All-time highlights: All-time stats, most popular time, and the day your site got the best views ever.
- Latest post: How many views, likes, and comments your most recent post received.
- Most popular post in the past year: The post that was most popular in the past 365 days with the view count, likes, and comments.
- Posting activity: A visualization of your posting trends, showing how many posts you published and when.
- All-time insights: A color-coded table showing the total views in a month and the average views per day in a month.
- Tags & Categories: The number of views your most popular tags and categories have received in the previous seven days.
- Comments: View a list of people with the most comments on your site and a list of the most-commented posts and pages.
- Shares: A summary of the social networks your posts have been shared to.
You can download reports of your stats as a CSV file by following these steps:
- Visit your dashboard.
- Click Stats on the left sidebar.
- Click the “View details” link at the bottom of any module on your Stats page, such as Posts & pages, Referrers, or Countries.
- Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click the “Download data as CSV” link.
- On some sections like Videos and File downloads, the “Download data as CSV” button is found at the top right.
- Save the file to your computer.
Jetpack Stats tracks and retains the following information about your site’s visitors:
- Post and page views
- Video plays
- Outbound link clicks
- Referring URLs and search engine terms
- Country
As part of collating the above information, Jetpack Stats uses data like IP address, WordPress.com user ID (if logged in), WordPress.com username (if logged in), user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, and country code. However, none of this information is available to site owners. For example, a site owner can see that a specific post has 285 views, but he/she cannot see which specific users/accounts viewed that post. Furthermore, the Jetpack Stats logs, in which this information is stored, are only retained for 28 days.
