PureBlogging

Stats! Don’t you just love ‘em? I know I do and ever since starting my first blog I’ve been addicted to checking my stats. In fact, I had to wean myself off checking them several times a day, and have now narrowed my stats packages to just four. Here they are.

Getting Clicky

By far the most useful is Clicky, which I can now install on a Wordpress blog as a plugin. If you’ve been using Performancing’s new stats package, you should know that it’s a rebranded version of Clicky. I love Clicky because it looks good and it’s easy to get all the info I really need from the dashboard, which is customizable. It’s easy to see where visitors came from, what they clicked on, who’s linking to you and much more. One of my favourite tools is the Spy view, which gives you real time stats. I also like the feature that allows you to link IPs to identity. I’ve reviewed Clicky in more detail here.

Google Analytics

You can’t talk analytics without considering Google’s own tool, which I also use. However, I find it most useful for checking my stats once a month for trends. I usually compare the month just past against the one before to see how things have changed. I like to see what’s gained in popularity, where my best traffic sources are and how my other promotional activities have contributed to increasing blog traffic. There’s also a lot more that I don’t use, such as goals tracking, but it’s there if you need it.

Buzz! 103 Bees

I only use 103Bees on one of my blogs and it’s a different kind of stats package. This makes it easy for me to see where search engine, social and paid traffic is coming from. It’s also useful because it tracks the questions and keywords that people ask in finding the site. I find it the easiest way to get an overview of this aspect of my site, and it works better for me than similar functions in the other stats packages. What I like about this is the ability to create To Do lists out of the questions, which makes it easy to identify future blog topics.

Feedburner

Although I look at Feedburner’s own stats, a new tool has made it even easier to make some sense of these. It’s BlogPerfume’s free online feed analysis tool. Just type in the address of your Feedburner feed and you get a selection of useful stats, including how your subscribers have grown, the number of hits, views and clicks, the potential ad value of your blog (this was slightly below other predictions, but it’s a new tool) and the predicted growth of your blog. I’ve also been able to find out which are the best and worst readership days on my blog.

Putting It All Together

So, how do I use all of these together to make me a better blogger? 103Bees tells me what people are using to find my blog, so that I can use these same phrases to generate new content. It also helps me to identify the posts that are popular with the social bookmarking sites. The Feed Analysis tool helps me track how the blog is doing and think about where it’s going. Clicky allows me to keep on top of daily reactions to my blog through links and email, while Analytics gives me a useful overview. I’ve noticed that the Clicky and Analytics numbers don’t always match up, but with these four tools I feel I have a good handle on managing my blog. What are your favourite stats packages and why?