How To Measure Your Blog Traffic

Written By Tan Hai Liang

How do you measure the traffic to your blog? How many readers do you have? These are the questions that every blogger will want to know.

Since I am using wordpress, I’ll only talk about measuring traffic in your wordpress blog.

There are a few tracking scripts that you can use to track and measure your blog traffic. However, it is known that all these tracking scripts are not very accurate. The accuracy depends on browser settings in accepting scripting or not. Other factors such as spiders also affect your true readership number, because software spiders can also be counted as readers.

Despite its inaccuracies, you still need to track and measure your blog traffic, at least to get an impression or an idea how it is progressing.

As wordpress users, you can install a wordpress plugin to track your blog. It is a simple no fuss plugin that gives you a brief summary of your traffic from your Dashboard. Installing it is easy, download it from here, unzip it, open the “stats.1.2.2″ folder and upload the “stats” folder into the wp-content/plugins directory using your ftp program. Log into your blog and activate the plugin. You need to use wordpress’s API key to activate it.

Click on “Akismet Configuration” near the top navigation bar and copy the API key to use the same API key for your stats. If you haven’t got your Akismet activated, then you should get it done now. This helps to filter out spam to your blog. Follow the instructions to get API key from Akismet plugin.

I also use Google Analytics to track some of my other sites. You can use Google Analytics but you need to edit your theme files.

Open an account with Google Anayltics here and set up your account. Add a new website in Google Analytics and use your blog url as the new website address. Then you copy the tracking code.

Use the theme editor to edit your “footer.php” file listed on right hand side of the window. Copy the tracking code to a line above the tag “</body>”. Update your footer file and check if your have inserted the code correctly. Google Analytics will check for you whether you have inserted your code correctly. If it is receiving data, then you have done it correctly. If Analytics is not receiving data, then you have inserted the code incorrectly.

Try to start your tracking now, so you can keep a record of the number of people visiting your site. This way, you know that your blog is being appreciated.