How to Videos for Wordpress Blogging

Why Is It Important to Monitor Your Wordpress Blog Stats?

You have blogging goals, presumably, and how will you know if you are hitting those goals if you don’t know your wordpress blog stats.

Your statistics can tell you many things: how many people visit each day, where they come from geographically, which pages they visit most and many other things as well.

Where Do I Find My Stats?

The first place to look for your stats is in Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free service provided by Google (obviously) to help you to monitor your wordpress blog traffic. Google analytics can monitor the traffic on any website not just on blogs. The key is to set it up properly.

We have a video in our video catalog called Install Google Analytics which will show you how to set up Google Analytics if you haven’t done so already.


Once you have installed Google Analytics you need to make sure that you have the proper filters in place. Our video on Google Analytics – How to Install a Filter is a useful blogging tool that you can find in one of our earlier posts. The filter is used to filter out your visits to your own wordpress blog so that Google doesn’t include your visits in your statistics.


The second place to look for your traffic statistics is in your cpanel which is connected to your hosting account. The statistics in your cpanel account will be different from those in your Google Analytics account because you can’t apply filters to your cpanel statistics.

Still it is useful to have a look in both places because you can glean extra information.

Step 1- Log Into Your Google Analytics Account

The first thing you will see is an overview of your wordpress blog traffic. Google Analytics keeps a running tally of how many people have visited our blog and compares it to the previous month (you can change these settings).

Step 2 – Look At Your Wordpress Blog Traffic Statistics In More Detail

Click on the view report button and you are taken to the dashboard. You see a graphical representation of the visitors per day along the top. You can change the time period displayed.

The dashboard also gives you an overview of the:

Whenever you click on view report under each category you see more detailed statistics. For very separate category you can find out:

The bounce rate is how quickly someone clicks onto your site and leaves again. The higher the bounce rate the quicker they are leaving so a lower bounce rate means they are actually staying on your wordpress blog site and reading or watching your content.

How Many People Visit My Wordpress Blog?

If you drill down deeper in the Visitor Overview section by viewing report you can see how many unique visitors you have had to your wordpress blog and how many are returning visitors.

The statistics also tell you how many pages on average they view on your blog, how long they stay on your blog and even the web browser they are using.

Where Does The Traffic To My Wordpress Blog Come From?

Clicking on the view report under the “Map Overlay” section of the Google Analytics dashboard will show which geographical regions your visitors come from. As you might expect most of our visitors come form the USA and Australia but we have European and Asian visitors as well. If you click on a country that you are interested in you can get more regional data as well. It’s actually quite amazing how specific you can become with these statistics.

Which Sites Send Traffic To My Wordpress Blog?

The traffic sources report gives you a visual representation of your traffic sources using a colored pie chart. You can easily track the main sources of your wordpress blog traffic. The major categories represented in the pie chart are referring sites, search engine and direct traffic.


A high proportion of search engine traffic means that you are getting lots of organic traffic. A high proportion of direct traffic may be coming from other strategies such as Google Adwords campaigns. Presumably, for a wordpress blog organic traffic would be the preferred traffic source.

If the content from your blog is being picked and utilized by other bloggers you might see a high proportion of referred traffic. Referred traffic may also come from other strategies such as using articles to drive traffic to your blog.

Which Keywords Are Important Sources Of Traffic For My Wordpress Blog?

Google Analytics even tells you which keywords draw the most traffic to your wordpress blog. This feature can be found within the traffic sources reports. This feature can help you track you Adword Campaigns. It can also tell you if you are using your keywords and keyphrases in an optimized way.

Which Parts Of My Content On My Wordpress Blog Are Drawing The Most Traffic?

This information can be found by drilling into the content reports. You can see which of your pages are being viewed most often. By using the site overlay feature you can see which of the links on your page are being clicked on most frequently.


There is also much more information that Google Analytics provides but these are the variables to check regularly so that you know how your wordpress blog is performing.


Your cpanel will also provide you with similar information but since each cpanel provides their statistical data in a slightly different way, it is too big a topic to discuss at this time.


If you need any help setting up Google Analytics on your wordpress blog our video on Installing Google Analytics will give you step by step instructions.

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Tags: Blog Tips, google analytics, wordpress blog