WordPress, Statistics and Plugins, Oh My!

So pretty much ALL of my regularly updated sites are running on WordPress, and I’ve been using it for quite some time for a couple of them, but only recently have I actually gotten semi-serious about trying to promote a site built with it. Because I am mostly lazy, and mostly couldn’t be bothered … but for some reason one of my newer sites has really fired my imagination, and suddenly I’m aspiring to be a total stats whore. Which kinda sucks with a default WordPress install … For one thing, WordPress itself, being a blogging platform and not a full-featured hosting package, has no built-in stats functions to speak of. For another thing, the vast majority of WordPress bloggers seem entirely more interested in the fun-and-easy aspects of blogging, and so most of what you find when you look for a stats plugin are cute little sidebar widgets that publicly list your top 10 most popular posts, and other mostly-useless features for my purposes.

However, I’ve found a couple good ‘built-in’ WordPress visitor statistic plugins (for moderate traffic sites <100K page requests/day), as well as one that pulls external stats from Feedburner and Google Analytics into your WordPress dashboard:

• Live, from Headzoo
  This little gem was suggested to me by a friend … it shows hits to your blog in real-time, scrolling down a page in your Dashboard area as they happen. Landing page, referring URL and visitor’s IP address are all displayed, and clickable. My only complaint? There is no way to exclude your own visits from the display. Add the option to exclude visits by a logged-in admin, and this is perhaps the most addictive little stat gadget ever! (It is, however, worth noting that it adds a bunch of extraneous page requests to your logs, which skews the next plugin.)
• StatPress by Daniele Lippi, irisco
  This plugin automatically excludes visits by logged in site members, and opens with a nice little overview bar graph that separates out spider visits, visitors, total pageviews and feed visits. You can then view detailed data that includes most recent pages visited, most popular pages, referrers and search phrases … This plugin itself does almost everything I’d want a stat plugin for WordPress to do, except that the “Top” lists in the detail view (top referrers, top search phrases, etc.) don’t seem to have any way to click through to a complete list of the item in question. (It is worth noting that StatPress will choke and die if your site gets hit with the Digg effect.)
• Tan Tan Noodles’s Wordpress Reports
  Another recommendation from a friend, this plugin pulls data from Google Analytics and Feedburner, and displays an overview in your Wordpress Dashboard. However the data actually displayed on your site isn’t terribly detailed, so you still have to go to either Google or Feedburner directly if you want any specific data. What would really make this plugin stand out is if each general overview actually linked directly to the appropriate section of your Google Analytics or Feedburner accounts.

Having just moved all my sites to a new hosting company, I took the opportunity to review my plugin lists … and am still using StatPress on all but one site, and WordPress Reports as well. However, I’m still looking for a quality, convenient and inexpensive log analysis package for the busiest site … if anyone has a suggestion for a good desktop log analyzer for Macintosh, I’d love to hear about it!