Wordpress Wednesday: Free Wordpress Analytics Solutions

Posted by Jonathan
March 25, 2009
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The second most important part of Niche Blogging, after content, is keeping track of everything. You need detailed analytics to understand who your readers are, what they’re reading and what is most popular content you’re creating.

There are many options out there for using Analytics on your Wordpress blog. Which one you choose will become an invaluable tool in your niche blogging toolbox, so it’s important to choose wisely.

Here are some great analytics free solutions for Wordpress:

Google Analtyics

Google Analytics is by far the most popular free analytics solution for many websites, including blogs. It’s the most feature rich package out there and it doesn’t cost a dime. It’s easy to implement on a Wordpress blog, especially with easy to use plugins.

It’s provides a great snapshot of your traffic based on daily, weekly and monthly trends. It tells you how many visitors you’ve had, where they’re coming from and how they’re finding you. It also has an e-commerce package that will allow you to track sales of products.

There is a downside to Google Analytics, however. It doesn’t catch everything. GA uses a script to track visitors and many visitors may have scripts blocked. This means that GA is only good for trend reporting because it’s numbers will always be slightly off.

Google Analytics

Piwik

Piwik is a free and open source solution that’s looking to supplant Google Analytics. It works much the same way as GA except that instead of relying on a free web service, you run Piwik on your own servers. All it needs is a SQL database and it’s tracking code installed on your website.

This means that your analytics solution will be as reliable as your webhost. It tracks a lot of the same data that GA tracks. It’s still relatively new to the analytics field so it’s not as feature rich and ‘pretty’ as Google Analytics. But it’s highly customizable, robust and has a great future. It’s worth checking out.

Piwik Analytics

Statpress

Statpress is a free Wordpress plugin that provides real time Analytics within your Wordpress dashboard. One of the downsides of Google Analytics is that it’s results are delayed by a day, so if there is a problem or a big spike in traffic, you won’t know about it until the next day. Statpress will give you up to the minute details of who’s coming to your site.

Another great thing about it is that it catches EVERYTHING, it catches a lot more hits than GA. It will also catch bots abusing your server, something GA does not track at all. This means you can spot people stealing your bandwidth, stealing your content or trying to spam your blog.

The downside of Statpress is that it catches everything and it’s difficult to parse the massive amount of data in a readable way. Some of the graphs and stats don’t really make sense and that hasn’t changed for a while.

The Statpress plugin is free and a must have for any Wordpress blog.

Download Statpress Wordpress Plugin.

Yahoo Analytics

Yahoo recently threw it’s hat into the Analytics realm with it’s own free product to battle with Google Analtyics. I haven’t had a chance to use it myself, but from what I understand it’s not as feature rich as Google Analytics and lacks in a lot of ways.

It’s still early days in it’s development though, so I expect Yahoo Analtytics to become more a competitor in the future as it’s developed.

Yahoo Analytics

Which is Best for You?

If you want to roll your own Analtyics solution, then Piwik is the choice for you.

I can only give advice based on my own experience and my solution is a combination of Google Analytics and Statpress. Google Analytics provides beautifully presented trend reporting and Statpress gives you a nuts and bolts view of what’s going on with your traffic. Both are important to have and that’s what I would recommend to anyone starting a niche blog.

What’s your Favorite Free Analytics Software?

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