Jetpack WordPress stats plugin review and case study
Whether you‘re a savvy blogger, businessman or an office worker, if you’re working with online information, you would most certainly need some sort of statistics tool. Some might not consider it a necessity, but more profound bloggers would treat it as a means of analyzing your online traffic and attracting more visitors. One way or another it will be present in almost every website or blog.
After having tested some powerful WordPress stats tools, I can vouch for two: Google analytics and WordPress Jetpack stats tool. Both are good, reliable and work pretty fast. They won’t slow down your website, but the statistical information will be comprehensive and accurate.
Installation
Installation of WordPress jetpack stats is fairly easy, almost like any other common plugin install.
What you need to do is log in to your website admin dashboard, click on the Plugins (middle left side) menu box, then click on the Add New submenu and enter “Jetpack by WordPress” without commas in the search field. Click Search Plugins.
Select the Jetpack by WordPress plugin and click Install Now. Make sure that you are running WordPress version 3.7 and above, otherwise it won’t work.
You could also find Jetpack through WordPress.org plugin directory and install it by uploading the files to your server via ftp program, but I prefer doing it from my admin dashboard – it’s much easier and quicker.
Configuration
First of all click on the Installed Plugins menu section, scroll to your installed Jetpack by WordPress plugin and activate it by pressing the Activate button.
After the plugin has been activated, you will see a notice on top of the page: Your Jetpack is almost ready – A connection to WordPress.com is needed to enable features like Stats, Contact Forms, and Subscriptions. Connect now to get fueled up!
Press the Connect to WordPress box in the top right corner.
You will be taken to a new page, where you will authorize the Jetpack connection by connecting to your wordpress.com account. If you don‘t have such account, you will have to sign up for it.
After the authorization, you will be taken to your wordpress plugin page where all other Jetpack plugins (Jetpack is a collection of 32 plugins) will be displayed along with the Jetpack stats plugin. You will have to deactivate the plugins you don’t want by pressing Learn more and then Deactivate on the plugin module card. That’s one drawback for Jetpack.
Usage
Plugin usage is fairly simple: first of all, click on the Site Stats submenu under the Jetpack menu on the upper left WP admin page. Daily website visits will be displayed by default, with the options for weekly and monthly visits.
If you select any particular day statistical data you will be shown the same information as in the weekly or monthly stats:
Your top (best visited) posts and pages;
clicks on outbound links on your website;
Referrers can be other websites sending traffic to your site and search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, etc.).
You won’t be able to see all your search engine terms with the current Google https protocol implementation, so about 80% of your search terms will be marked as unknown. The same results can be seen in Google analytics.
Clicks on your outbound links could be quite useful for affiliate click tracking and comparison with your affiliate program data. It surely won’t show your conversion or subscription rate, but knowing the exact number of outbound clicks is still useful, especially when choosing affiliate programs.
Summaries
You will notice an underlined summaries link on the upper right side of every data box. It will show you the data for the last 7, 30 days, quarter, year or all time.
Daily, weekly or monthly views summaries will be a bit different, as those will also show you the comparative table for daily, weekly and monthly visits. It’s very helpful, when you want to make a comparative data analysis.
Enhanced stats on WordPress.com
There’s one more cool feature, which I haven’t been noticing for a while, that’s at the top left side, under the date. There’s notice: Did you know you can view enhanced stats on WordPress.com?
Press show me button and you will be taken to your enhanced data on a wordpress.com page. You will have to log in to your wordpress.com account (by entering your email or username).
Besides the usual stats, I could also check the number of unique visitors, views by country and detailed stats for any post that’s been visited.
Summarizing Jetpack stats plugin
Pros:
Plugin does not eat up your server resources, as the data is processed on the wordpress.com cloud server.
You will be shown simple and comprehensive data.
Independence from Google. No additional third party Google code needs to be installed in your header file.
Plugin won’t be abandoned and outdated, as wordpress.com developers are behind it.
Cons:
You need to have a wordpress.com account.
You need to install it with a bunch of other plugins. However, you may disable the ones you don’t need.
Not that extensive as Google Analytics.
WordPress Jetpack plugin on WordPress.org
RECENT COMMENTS