I forgot to post the result to my last poll which finished a week or so back. The question to readers was ‘Where do most of your Blog’s Readers come from?’ The results were as following with search engines being the most popular response (click to enlarge picture).
Surprising to me were the large numbers of bloggers who responded with ‘no idea’.
Perhaps bloggers need to install some sort of statistics packages on their blogs. Here’s a post I wrote earlier in the year on how I use stats packages to enhance my blogging.
I’d be interested to hear how others go about tracking the results of their blogging? What stats systems do you use? What stats do you particular find helpful?
Between, StatCounter, SiteMeter and adsense I get a good idea of how many ‘visits’ I get each day. StatCounter breaks down the users in a more user-friendly interface but SiteMeter has it’s pros too.
I also feel compelled to see how my readership numbers are doing so I also check Feedburner every day… that way I can also figure out what entires were more popular, which aggregators people use, etc.
I think Statcounter is doing a great job on providing all the information of your visitors. You can easily check where your visitor came from. You can compare search engines, and even keywords used.
I’m fortunate enough to have deepmatrix stats on my server, which is great for delving into the whys and wherefors of my site visitors.
I wrote a post about it back in August : Server Logs, I guess around the time Darrens Poll appeared on here (lets just call it inspiration :D).
I’m quite amazed at the number of people who have no idea where there visitors are coming from – maybe its unimportant to them, but then if they are reading ProBlogger, I would assume they are interested in getting their site marketed to the right people.
I use AwStats which comes with my account to see where visitors are coming from and I also use a stat plugin for WordPress – WP-ShortStat which shows which pages/posts are popular.
I like knowing how a person got to my site, what type of search did they use, number of visitors, etc.
I’ve been using BS Stats for WordPress, but I’m not impressed – it generates an error message on the homepage which I’ve managed to hide via CSS.
As a stats package, it’s quite good, gives decent real-time referrer information and so on. Might switch to WP-Shortstat though.
For quick updates throughout the day, I use the free version of SiteMeter. It’s good for tracking human visitors because it doesn’t count bots etc. And it’s good enough to see where people are coming from, to get an idea of trends etc.
Two of my blogs use Webalizer which I’m quite happy with. My other blogs don’t have dedicated server stats built in yet – I need to get that sorted out really.
The most useful stats for me are the monthly/yearly total vistors/page view stats and the referral listings. As I only have the free version of SiteMeter, I keep my own record of popular search terms – I also click back to the search engine to see what position I come up in for those terms. It’s actually quite encouraging that often I’m on the first page of 10 results, but it’s also encouraging that people do seem to click through on search results several pages down (like the 40-50th position).
I use my personalised verion of Webalizer. However i’m looking for a nicer way to face my RSS-stats, what aggregators and so. Maybe feedburner, have some good impression on that with my blog. Problem is i should have known faster, now i will have to redirect my rss.xml file, and that won’t be very nice for my search engine optimization :(
I use AWStats, but then again, I have my own server, at home, so I can update it every half hour, instead of many installations which only update it daily.
As for me, most of my visitors come from blog exchangers… I think I’m still in the Google sandbox, because not only I get little traffic from google, but what little I get, the search phrases aren’t really the keywords I use, or the theme of my blogs themselves…
I’m using AWStats primarily. However not being able to run reports for a single day is a huge problem. So, I did use the shortstat WP plugin which gave me the additional reporting I needed, but I’ve had numerous performance problems with it and dumped it. I’m looking to purchase Urchin 6 software (not urchin 6 on demand) when it comes available.
I’m using Mint mostly–it’s New Unique Referrers pane is a great way to find new incoming visitors.
Currently, most of my visitors come via Google. I find it interesting to watch which keywords lead to which article and how often single articles are viewed on average. I use a stat application called StatiX (which I wrote myself).
I’m using StatTraq plugin of Word press. It collects following information
* Summary
* Hit Counter
* User Counter
* Page Views
* Browser
* Referrer
* Search Terms
* SE Saturation
* IP addresses
It displays graphs too. Get it here : http://www.randypeterman.com/StatTraq/index.php
I use Stattraq, I liked because it integrates with WordPress. And also I use PHP-Stats, because I gives me more information about visitors, search engines, queries, etc.
In my hosting plan, I have Awstats, but I don’t use it a lot, because it registers everything, including referer spam (a problem I had with my photoblog). So it’s not an accurate reading of my visitors.
It varies where the visitors come, one my blogs has only 14.7% of visitors coming from search engines, and the others are about 45% coming from search engines.
Hey Darren –
I did use the ShortStat plug-in for WordPress but noticed that after a few weeks it really started to lag to the point where my pages wouldn’t finish loading forever. After I removed it, “zip!” right back to fast loading.
I’m taking a look at some of the various packages your visitors commented about and will post back if there’s anything relevant to say that hasn’t already been said! :)
Best,
Vernon
You forgot to mention about mybloglog. I signed up for the service after I read about it here and it has been a useful tool. The most important use of it has been in re-arranging ad location and also re-arranging the links on the page.
Thanks for posting the result, very useful indeed.
Someone mentioned this before but I’ll do it again with a few comments:
http://pphlogger.phpee.com/
I setup Power Phlogger on of of my domain. Like many stat packages, I need to generate a simple JavaScript code to paste on my blog. I usually paste it on the footer.php file on my WP templates.
It may be quite old but still works quite well. It allows me to see what keywords SE refer to me (including the exact SE).
What I like most is that it provides thorough information, one access per line of the visitors, including visitors’ path. For example, I know that after adding RSS syndications of my other blogs on the same domain at the bottom of the page, my pageviews increase.
You may need basic PHP installation skills to get it up and running but once you’ve done that you can use it on as many domain as you have. Neat.
With PPhlogger and AWStats package from CPanel, I can get insights from my log without having to download any log files.
Hmm.. I am not sure why other peopole can’t run reports during the day wtih AWstats. I click “update” every 13 mins to see what’s going on.. It’s a live update software that let’s you see in real time what people on doing on the site..
yunasville,
I’ve been on some hosting companies where they don’t allow refreshing/updating AWstats every so hours, let alone minutes. The link is disabled because the fact that it can hog resources.
Back then when I was in the ISP industry, the server can take up to 20 seconds just to process the log file (about 100,000 lines per second if memory serve me well).
CPU and computer technology in general improved but still many hosting don’t recommend the practice. I’ve heard customers getting an email telling them to stop refreshing AWstats.
Being able to use other stats package has its own advantage because if you compare different stats package will usually give you different results.
I have also become a fan of StatCounter and have watched it grow in terms of the information that it offers – good selection and the keyword elements are particularly good.
They have been promising for a while to bring out an Advanced version and reduce charges at the same time, since although the basic package is free, it only stores information on the last 100 page hits that you can do the analysis with although it keeps number of visitors and number of page hits from the set up of the account onwards.
Well worth a look.
Mark
Does anyone know of anything (similar to AWstats) that is *easy* to install, but uses my log files and not javascript?
Beth, I think you can try out weblogexpert http://www.weblogexpert.com/. I’m using this one for my site, here is public stats http://cyberciti.biz/nixcraft/stats/ (limited stats only) you can try out 30 days trial (full version). It is the one of the best I ever used :)
Sitemeter, Statcounter and Awstats… everything I need, I think!
The main problem I see with web analytics solutions is that they not 100 percent accurate and are not setup to track everything which would affect the accuracy of the poll results. I use Statcounter, Urchin, WebTrends and other analytics solutions for my clients and have seen significant variations in numbers.
I think there is one missing answer: they come from nowhere or people-who-type-the-url-directly ;-)
Most of my readers come from search engines and the rest I would say come from my other websites and friends.