Addicted to stats?
Hi, my name is Wendy and I have not checked my stats for 10 minutes.
All kidding aside, with as many blogs and sites as I have (and those that I maintain for others) I can’t take too much time to obsess over traffic stats, reader behavior, or unique visitors.
Mainly because I have this silly idea that I should do other things instead– like see my children through the day and brush my teeth after meals.
This isn’t to say that checking stats is a total waste of time, just that obsessing over things like pagerank and backlinks and daily traffic doesn’t do a whole lot if you find yourself checking your stats more than actually working on refining your site and writing content.
WordPress has oodles and gobbles of nice plugins for statistics, I like StatPress and StatPress Reloaded– but I’m not sure which one I like better (I have versions of each on different sites, StatPress has nice pie charts but StatPress Reloaded has easily read info if you’re not so much into the pie charts.)
There’s also the Google: Analytics and Webmaster Tools (both are useful, Analytics for traffic behavior and Webmaster Tools to see all the linking and SEO stuff and to detect errors or malware on your site.)
As tempting as it may be to check everything daily, the prudent (time utilizing plan) is to check your stats weekly and if necessary, keep a notebook handy to jot down one or two tasks which will help improve your site’s traffic and search engine standings.
For example you may need to promote a few key posts, or want to update old posts with some fresh internal links and on the SEO side, install a plugin like XML Sitemaps Generator so that search engines can more easily index your site. This can be a day or two after checking your stats so that you have time to consider where you might make improvements and you’ll still have time through the week to do things that you can blog about or even have a little free time to enjoy life.