Metrics nerds, rejoice!

For those who are interested in their blog’s metrics, my new love is TanTan’s Google Analytics and Feedburner Plugin.

Metrics nerds probably monitor these metric packages anyway, but the wonderful thing about these plugins is that they automate it right into your Wordpress dashboard.

That’s right.

Rather than opening up a separate tabs for Feedburner or Googe Analytics, you can log into your blog and have the results right there in the dash. Coupled with my installation of Wp-Slimstat, I can now, at a glance get an easy view of most of my blog’s metrics all in one place.

TanTan’s plugin is an easy install. Download the .zip file, unzip it, upload the folder to your plugins folder, then activate.

From there, another tab called “reports” is created in the dashboard. Just follow the instructions therein and you’ll be rarin’ to go in no time.

The other advantage — it allows you to install the Google Analytics code-snippet auto-magically! That is, you won’t have to edit the “footer.php” of your favourite theme to put that piece of javascript.
Now, then having said that, the metrics are a bit limited.

Feedburner stats show the Daily Circulation only the number of people subscribing per day.

Google Analytics stats show Daily visits, pageviews, and pageviews per visit.

Having said that it does give a great flavour of what’s going on; what’s also nice is how they are also presented in a graphical bar graph format for the past 7 days.

What would have been nice is a link next to these graphs that will go to the actual site; sort of to acknowledge that it presents limited data — but with this link you can go to the full level of metrics.

Don’t know about Feedburner or Google Analytics?
For the uninitated, Feedburner is a webservice that monitors your feed stats, and can approximate the number of “subscribers” you might have towards your feed; it does many other things as well, such as tell you what sort of readers people are using to read your RSS feed, and allow you to edit the way the feed looks to people. The basics package is free, but there is a more “PRO” package for about $4/month.

Google Analytics is a rich (some say, a little too rich) metrics package that allows you to see a cornucopia of statistics about your blog, from the daily visitors, but also the number of pageviews per visitor. It also tracks (amongst other things) where your people are coming from, do a site overlay and tell you where people are clicking on your site, and also give you an idea of how long people are actually sitting on your site. Best part? Its free.

Anyway, its definitely recommended. Check it out!
http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/