Google Analytics is a fantastic tool for tracking web stats, but this past week, I realized it doesn’t track quite as much as I’d like. A few questions I’d like it to answer but it can’t:
- Do high traffic posts, like Columnizer updates, generate more subscribers?
- Do the frequency or length of my posts affect how long a visitor stays? or subscriber count?
- Does higher traffic or more frequent posts generate more comments?
- etc
Basically, I want to know not only if a statistic is up or down, but how it correlates to another statistic. And most importantly, I want to know this not only about statistics tracked by Google Analytics, but by statistics that can’t be tracked by Google Analytics – things like post frequency, Feedburner subscriber count, etc.
The solution: merge a number of different WordPress plugins into a single WordPress Mu plugin and then tie the results into a pair of easy to use flot graphs. Pics of the results:
The plugin connects to and downloads statistics from Google Analytics, Feedburner, and Google Reader. Stats from each of those sources is downloaded and cached in the WordPress database, which makes querying, comparing, and joining the data next to trivial. I also have plans to optionally integrate it with SlimStat, which will provide additional traffic stats that Analytics doesn’t currently provide – such as “what day of the week or time of day is most common?”
I’ve only been poking at this a bit over the past week, and I’m still working out the last details of the plugin – automating the install sql, etc – so I’m not going to post a download quite yet, but you can check out the results at the bottom of my About page.
If you’re interested in beta testing out the plugin on your own Mu install, or helping port it to standard WordPress, give me a shout in the comments.
Check out the project page for code and project info.