Posts Tagged ‘analytics’

I wrote about Statpress in this post. If you missed it, StatPress is a powerful analytics plug-in for use with WordPress. It doesn’t require a lot of set-up, but one thing you’re going to want to do is ban your own IP address from being logged. This will give you a more accurate idea of how many visitors are coming to your site without the data being skewed by your own visits as your update and maintain your site.

I highly suggest you use a couple of free applications for this:

FileZilla
Notepad++

These are both FREE open source programs. Both powerful, but simple enough for those of us who are a bit technically challenged. These two programs streamline the process of banning your IP in StatPress.

Step 1
Open up FileZilla and put in your log in information for your hosting account.

Step 2
Navigate to the Plug-Ins folder. The path is something like this: /public_html/yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins .

Step 3
Open up the StatPress folder. You will see a list of files like this:

Step 4
Double-click the “def” folder to open it and view the contents.

Step 5
Right-click “banips.dat” and select “View/Edit” from the drop down menu. FileZilla opens the file in your selected text editor. In this case, mine is Notepad ++.  You will see that banips.dat is a simple file that is only a list of IP addresses. There is only one address by default. Here, I have already added mine. You can add as many as you need. If you access your website from more than one computer or location, you can put all of your IP addresses in this file to exclude them from your StatPress stats.

Step 6
Type or copy and paste your IP addresses into the file, one IP address per line. Save the file and exit. FileZilla automatically detects that you have changed the file with a pop-up window.

Step 7
Left-click “Yes” to upload the updated banips.dat file back to your server. You IP address is now excluded from your StatPress stats.

You’re done!

StatPress is…you guessed it…a WordPress plug-in. StatPress logs information about the visitors to your WordPress site including: number of visitors, pageviews, search terms, operating system, country, city and IP address.

StatPress allows you to keep track of who is visiting your site, where they are from and how they got there. Keep track of detailed analytics without embedding hit counter codes or displaying anything at all on the front end of your WordPress site. Using StatPress is as easy as installing the plug-in through WordPress’ dashboard and activating it. Once StatPress is installed and activated, it immediately begins returning data. There is essentially no set-up. However, to prevent StatPress from logging your IP when you visit your site to update or perform maintenance, you will need to ban your own IP address.

This can be a little tricky if you don’t know what you are doing, so I’ve outlined a How To here. StatPress adds a nifty little sidebar to your Dashboard. You can view it by clicking the button usually located at the bottom under “Settings”.

Overview

The StatPress Overview give you a lot of information. The first thing you see is a color-coded table of the number of visitors to your site, pageviews, spiders and feeds. A bar graph represents the numbers giving you a visual of your traffic. The StatPress Overview also give you these number for the following time periods: total for all time, this month, last month, yesterday and today. If you’re an avid goal setter, then you’re also appreciate the Target amounts which both predicts and gives you something to aim for based on your current stats.

The Overview continues with several sections: Last hits, Last search terms, Last referrers, Last agents, Last pages and Last spiders.

Last hits tells you the date, time, IP address, country/language, page visited, feed, operating system and browser of the last 10 hits to your site.

Last search terms tells you the last 10 (if applicable) search terms used to reach your WordPress site.

Last referrers tells you from where your last 10 visitors were referred. So, if you have a signature link on the forums or a link on your Facebook profile that visitors are clicking, StatPress will tell you that here.

Last agents tells you the last agents that crawled your site.

Last pages tells you the last pages that were visited on your site.

Last spiders tells you the last spiders to crawl your site to index and syndicate your content.

Details

Left-click “Details” in your StatPress sidebar. The Details view shows you pie charts of the following stats: top days for visits, operating systems, browsers, feeds, search engine traffic, top search terms, top referrers, countries/languages, spiders, top pages, top days by number of uniques, top days by pageviews and top IP addresses by pageviews.

Spy

Left-click “Spy” in your StatPress sidebar. The Spy view shows you the IP address, country flag, date, time and pages viewed by your visitors in the order of last, first. You can view additional information including city, operating system and browser used by your visitors by clicking the “More Info” link.

Search

Left-click “Search” in your StatPress sidebar. Using the StatPress Search allows you to search your analytics by the following criteria: URL requested, agent, referrer, search terms, search engine, operating system, browser, spider and IP address.

Export

Left-cick “Export” in your StatPress sidebar to export a date range of your stats into an Excel document.

Options

Left-click “Options” in your StatPress sidebar to adjust the following settings.

StatPressUpdate

Left-click “StatPressUpdate” in your StatPress sidebar to refresh your StatPress views with the latest data.

StatPress Blog

Left-click “StatPress blog” in your StatPress sidbar to visit the StatPress blog for updates and news about the plug-in.

That’s about it. StatPress is a plug-in that couldn’t be easier to use, but packs a lot of info for your trouble.