Using the new Wibstats system

Tags: statistics, wibstats, visitors, graphs

Date: 04 January 2010 13:35:50

As some of you have already seen (thanks for the nice messages, by the way) the Wibstats blog statistics software has been updated. There are quite a few changes, here's a quick list:

New menu system - the separate reports now appear as menu items in the left-hand list (at the bottom, below Settings)
Fixes for the date range reports (they are faster to load, and I've also learned to count)
Fixes for referring site reports (it now ignores search engines)
New percentage columns (for instance the percentage of people who visited from the U.K.)
Times reports showing when people visited your blog, for example the number (and percentage) of people visiting on each day of the week

There are also some other changes which, frankly, I can't remember right now. But there is one thing I do remember which is prety cool. I've used the Wordpress shortcodes system so you can put your statistics right into your blog posts and pages. How? Simples:

[wibstats report="popularsearches"]

Will give you;

[wibstats report="popularsearches" cache="-1"]

Want another example? OK:

[wibstats report="recentcountries"]

Gives:

[wibstats report="recentcountries" cache="10"]

Pretty cool, huh? There are quite a few different reports you can show (these go in the report="report-name-here" bit).

popularcountries: The most popular countries to visit your blog
popularcities: The most popular cities to visit your blog
recentcountries: The most recent countries to visit your blog
recentcities: The most recent cities to visit your blog
popularbrowsers: The most popular browsers to visit your blog
popularplatforms: The most popular platforms (operating systems) to visit your blog
popularscreensizes: The most popular screen sizes to visit your blog
popularsearches: The most popular search words which found your blog
recentsearches: The most recent search words which found your blog
populardays: The most popular days of the week that people visited your blog
popularhours: The most popular hours of the day that people visited your blog
popularmonths: The most popular months of the year that people visited your blog
popularreferrers: The most popular referring websites that sent visitors to your blog
recentreferrers: The most recent referring websites that sent visitors to your blog
session: A breakdown of the data associated with the current visitor to your blog (their country, city, browser etc)

A couple of other options allow you to configure these reports as they display on your posts/pages.

size: sets the number of items you want to show (minimum 1, maximum 100)

cache: sets how long you want the report to be cached for. Caching means that the report isn't recalculated every time someone visits the page, meaning the page is a little bit faster to load.

The size option is set in minutes, with "0" meaning not-cached-at-all (the report is recalculated every time someone visits the page it appears on) and "-1" for cached forever (the report is generated once then remains the same forever).

So, a couple more examples:

[wibstats report="popularcities" size="25"]

This shows the top 25 most popular cities to visit your blog.

[wibstats report="recentsearches" size="5" cache="0"]

This shows the top 5 latest search words which brought visitors to your blog, and is not cached at all.

[wibstats report="popularreferrers" size="50" cache="-1"]

This shows the top 50 most popular referring websites (sites that have a link to your blog) and is cached forever. This means the report will show what the top referring sites are now and will never be updated.

Hopefully these options are pretty easy to understand. Give me a shout in the forums or comments here if you get stuck.

In the future I hope to do some more features for Wibstats (which is available for anyone to use) including:

Reports by email: the Wibstats system emails you daily, weekly or monthly with the latest stats from your blog
Proper graphs, pie charts and more
A "live" view showing who is visiting your blog Right Now
Details on how long people looked at pages for, and where they went when they left

That lot may take me some time to complete, however...