Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
8
Commission (FCC) inquiry into the status of Google Voice on the iPhone. The posting came just a
few days after the responses were received. It got a lot of search traffic, and the author of the post
(Smith) also posted a comment on the TechCrunch blog in response to an article there. This drove
additional traffic. Finally, among the people who've visited gvDaily in the past, some might have
bookmarked or remembered it, and come to visit in time to see the new post. A few might have
even alerted friends to the post.
Let's take a quick look at the stats offered in this small view before we look at the larger one:
•
Views per Day chart
—WordPress sums up your views per day for the past two weeks in one
handy chart. This is really nice to have; you can see whether traffic is increasing or decreasing
over time, and put daily stats in context with recent performance.
•
Top Posts (the Past Week)
—This is useful for highlighting what's hot; it would be great if the
date of each post could be squeezed in here somehow for perspective.
•
Most Active (the Past Day)
—This is a nice snapshot, though a single day is a bit short as a
period for analysis for most blogs. (Except perhaps on a day when something big is happening
that drives traffic, especially if you post on it more than once per day.)
•
Top Searches
—This is how people get to your blog when they come in through search engines.
A great pointer to what keywords have been working for you.
The Stats Page in WordPress Administration
There are two ways to see the full Stats page:
•
Click the View All button in the corner of the Stats area.
•
Choose Blog Stats from the Dashboard menu in the upper-left corner of the Administration area.
Either way, you soon see the full Stats page for your blog, as shown in Figure 8.2.
note
Automattic seems well aware of how important stats are to WordPress users. It has drastically improved its
stats offering within the last couple of years and places it prominently on the Administration page, as well as in
pride of place as the first entry in the Dashboard menu in the upper-left corner of the Administration page—the
first spot most people look at on a page. (It's a good thing for Automattic that Google invented Google
Analytics for the truly obsessed, or Automattic might have had to do that as well!)
note
The first peak of traffic for the blog occurred when Google announced that its Google Voice app was rejected
from the App Store—and then, like a scene from
The Godfather
, other developers' Google Voice apps disap-
peared from the App Store, one by one, over the next day. Within three days, the FCC had its famous letters of
inquiry out to Apple, AT&T, and Google, creating a flood of stories—and, apparently, of interest from web users.
The second peak is when the companies publicized their responses to the FCC at the deadline three weeks
later, as described previously.
