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WordPress.com Doesn’t Allow the Use of Google Analytics for Basic Users

But what WordPress.com does provide is quite a lot of stats that give us insight into how our blogs and websites are doing. I’ve been using WordPress for 3 years now, primarily with a free account although I have acquired the domain for my site too. I’ve been afraid to switch everything to it fearing that I’ll mess it all up.

The reason why is precisely because of what I discovered the other day quite by accident.

I Discovered a New View That I’d Never Seen Before

It Displays Statistics for All My Posts & Pages

The Screenshot below shows virtually everything I’ve written in the 3 years since I began vsatips

Click here to view this in full screen mode.

I Knew I’d Written A Lot But This View Really Reinforced That

What’s even cooler than seeing everything I’ve ever written in the past 3 years in one nice screenshot, is seeing how well each of them performed in meeting the needs of my audience.

Using this data will be really valuable for me in deciding what I should and shouldn’t write about going forward. It will also help me recognize areas in which my writing needs to improve. I can already see how some of my headlines and titles could have been improved upon. So I can use this as a working document for tweaking and improving my website.

Why I Fear Making the Switch to My Own Domain

Seeing all my content quite literally in black and white also helps me to understand my my fear of switching to my own domain. If I goof it up, I could  potentially  goof up three years worth of work! But, it also gives me a roadmap of sorts for that same scenario too.

How Did I Find This View | Is it New?

I wish I could remember exactly how I arrived here…but I don’t think it’s new…or at least brand new that is. I think I found it somewhere near the top line that’s displayed on the left-hand side menu for WordPress.com stats. I know I’ll figure it out soon enough and then will come here and add that information here too. But, I needed to get this screenshot published for another reason too. The image file size is too large to include it as one of many illustrations on another post I’m currently working on. I’m finally writing my long promised sequel to ‘How to Use Different Colored Fonts and Sizes in Evernote on Mobile Devices.‘ That first article, one of the most read posts on my blog, has been rendered obsolete with the introduction of Evernote 8 for ios. I’d promised readers for a long time I’d update my guide for using different colors and sizes of fonts for ios and I finally did today. You can find the updated post here.

In that article I discuss the original post and include an abbreviated view of the screenshot above rather than excluding the image entirely because the file size and resolution of it was so large that I knew my Evernote post would take a really long time to load the webpage if I didn’t. But I wanted the full screenshot to be available too so  I decided to publish it as a ‘ standalone ‘ post  that I could link to from the other one instead.

So, I need to go finish writing the Evernote guide now. But before I do there’s one more thing I should mention. The screenshot above isn’t exactly the view I found on my stats pages. Rather that one was very long and unwieldy so I took screenshots from of it and I pasted them together using Pixelmator for iPad(which is one of my 2 most used ‘graphics design apps for ios!)

 Analyzing  the  Numbers

Having been a statistics major in my MBA Program I recognize that there’s a wealth of undiscovered knowledge buried within the data contained in this single image. While I was very sad that WordPress.com didn’t publish their very cool ‘Year in Review‘ for 2016…finding this stats page sort of makes up for it.

:-)

Comparing Weebly Stats to WordPress.com

I’d be really interested to know if anyone who reads my post has experience with their own blogs or websites at Weebly. And it yes, how well their blog posts perform according to Weebly’s bulletin user stats. Someday soon I’d really like to compare Weebly’s ‘free’ statistics for their users to the same thing I’m  displaying here from WordPress.coms.

The reason is because my 91 year old Dad has his blog on Weebly, (he was my inspiration,) and we occasionally discuss how our blogs are performing in the visitors’ and views’ realms. I’m sure 100% sure that my Dad is reporting the correct stats to me. If he is then a comparison betweeen the 2 would be more than warranted, because he relates some crazy large numbers to me sometimes…and I’d like to figure out if he’s really seeing that many visitors or is there’s something else going on that I don’t know about. If/when I do that I may add it here rather than write a whole new post. Don’t you think it would fit in nicely here? Let me know if you have any strong opinions on the subject below in my comments section, and thanks for reading and letting me be completely self indulgent for one post!

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