It is vital in SEO, PPC, affiliate marketing, shopping portals and now blogging to understand where your traffic is coming from, where they are going and how long they are staying. I am very familiar with tracking statistics and I know I need to put tracking into my wordpress ASAP.

To do this I will be installing both Google analytics which provides a rich amount of data about the visitors that visit my site. However one of the main problems with google analytics is that there is a delay for information. So to get around that I will also be installing statscounter which is live up to the second traffic stats but without all the fancy information that google analytics can provide. To get the code snippets that Google Analytics and statscounter provides I will be installing two plugins into my wordpress self hosted software.

The first plugin is Google Analytics and I found a really easy to install pluging called Ultimate GA developed by OraTransplant. You can download the zip file here: Ultimate GA 1.5.3 Once you download this file unzip it to your desktop and upload the ultimate_ga_1.5.3 folder to your plugins directory located at /root/wordpress/wp-content/plugins. Be sure to upload the entire folder and not just the folder contents.

The second plugin is the StatsCounter Plugin that I found from Lukes Lot blog You can download the zip file here: StatsCounter Plugin. Once you download the file unzip it to your desktop. Upload the statscounter.php file to the plugins directory just like above, but this time you don’t need to include the folder you just need to upload the php file.

Thats all you need to get started to track your visitors movements on your blog. I will be watching my stats closely to see where my traffic is comming from and I will be using the stats to measure what ways of blog promotion are working the best by measuring my increase of traffic. I am sure I will post this information in the future for all to see.

Lastly dont forget to signup for Google Analytics and Statscounter before going live with the plugins. The plugins will need your account ids once installed. Read the reference pages for the plugins to find out where to get the ID’s from.

Here are the links to the traffic monitors so you can sign up to

Stats Counter

Google Analytics

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