Top 5 Analytics Tools To Track Your Blog

One of the most important aspects of managing a blog is keeping tabs on your analytics and tracking your visitors. This type of data is useful in planning your marketing strategy, SEO campaigns and most importantly for creating content. On our psd to html website we used to write many blog posts and relied only on comments to discover what were the most popular topics. But no more.

With the following analytics tools you’ll be able to see just what your visitors are looking for and are interested in reading. These reports are great for seeing which of your posts are getting the most hits. You can use that data to help you create quality content and focus on the topics that will help you generate more traffic.

The 5 analytics tools listed below will focus on showing you just what your visitors are reading when they visit your blog. You’ll also be able to see their location, which comes into play for PPC campaigns because it will help you determine which regions to focus on. Best of all, these 5 tools are sure to help you boost not only your traffic, but also revenue.

Google Analytics

Most bloggers have a Google Analytics account, which is used to give in-depth information and statistics regarding their blog traffic. While many opt to simply use the tracking code provided by Google, there is actually a better option and that’s using the Google Analytics WordPress plugin. This user-created plugin adds numerous additional features that are not available by simply using the basic Google tracking code. First of all, this plugin “uses the asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code, which makes it the fastest and most reliable tracking code.”

With it you get: automatic site speed tracking; outbound link and downloads tracking; the ability to use custom variables to track metadata; the ability to ignore any user level; Google AdSense integration (if desired); optional link tagging and hashtags for campaign tracking; debug mode; tracking and view sorting by author; and much more. So as you can see, it’s definitely worth using this plugin over the basic Google tracking code.

Visitor Maps and Who’s Online

This WordPress plugin focuses on how many people are viewing your blog and showing you where they’re located. You’ll get a visitors map with location pins, city and country details. There is an optional sidebar widget as well as a dashboard widget that will show you how many people are online at the moment. The sidebar widget is customizable and can show things like the number of guest and members that are currently viewing your blog and also their location. Additional options in the admin area include host lookup for IP addresses, online time, Who Is lookup and much more.

WassUp

Automatically updated statistics are great, but real-time is even better and that’s what WassUp offers. You can see visitors as they’re viewing your blog and see what they’re doing while there. It’s a great way to see which of your posts are getting the most hits. Tracking is all done in real-time and there is also an optional customizable sidebar widget that you can use to display your visitors’ activities to the world.

This plugin is not for those who want to know things like how many visitors you’re getting per day or how many pageviews per month, etc. Its main focus is to let you keep track of your visitors and get details about what they’re actually viewing on your blog. There are 4 different types of views that you can use to see your visitors activities along with a “dashboard widget that shows a line chart of hits over time and count of current visitors online and their latest activities.”

WP SlimStat

This is another plugin that lets you track visitors in real-time on a world map, but it’s very lightweight and won’t slow down your blog at all. It’s simple yet powerful and is great for “spying on your visitors and tracking what they do on your website.” Features included are: spy view, screen resolution tracking, browser and OS (operating system) detection, location tracking, IP address restricting, along with numerous filtering options.

Zamango Analytics

This plugin can be used to add trackers for various analytics tools like Google and GoStats without slowing down your blog. This plugin is very simple and not for those who want to view in-depth charts and statistics right on their blog. This plugin simply adds the needed tracking codes for you; you’ll then have to go to that respective site in order to view your reports and data. This plugin is not for statistics maniacs, since it only contains the required functionality needed to add any type of custom counter or tracker.

When choosing the right tool it’s important to keep speed a top priority. While many tools offer tons of features, ask yourself if you really need all of those features. More than likely you don’t and the more features offered the more it will slow down your blog. So be sure to pick a tool that offers just what you need and nothing more.

You don’t want a plugin that will significantly slow down the load time of your pages; this is the easiest way to lose readers. Any one of the 5 tools listed above are more than capable of providing you with all the necessary data with top speeds to match.

This was a post by Lior Levin who works for a psd to html company and also advises to an applicant tracking software company from New York.