Google Analytics is a full-featured analytics suite that is free to all to use. The data it captures lets blog owners know referrers to their site, keywords, popular posts, unique visitors and so much more.

With the Google Analyticator plug-in, you can view a summary of the blogs Google Analytics, for the past 30 days, right on the dashboard for quick and easy access.

Here’s how to setup Google Analytics on WordPress’ dashboard.

1. Sign up for a free Google Analytics account. If you already have a Gmail, or other Google account, then just sign-in. http://www.google.com/analytics/

Get Google Analytics

2. Get the Google Analyticator plug-in, install it on the blog, activate the plug-in, and remember to configure it.

Download The Plug-In

3. Once you have Google Analyticator up and running, go into the settings click the link to authenticate with Google.

Authenticate with Google

4. Google will then ask you to grant access.

Grant Access

5. Once access is granted, Google Analyticator will confirm that you are indeed authenticated.

Authenticated

6. Head back to the WordPress dashboard and check out the blogs Google Analytics summary for the past 30 days.

Dashboard Google Analytics Summary

That’s it. Google Analytics integration into WordPress’ dashboard is complete.

What I’d love to see is the ability to break down data based on a specific date range, however for a quick summary, Google Analyticator provides an easy way to see Google Analytics information on a blogs WordPress dashboard.

Analytics are one item that every site owner should be looking into to find out where traffic is coming from and how users are interacting with the site.  However, analytics can sometimes be to much to consume with to much information or a cluttered interface.

Fortunately there are many analytics packages available that make reading and understanding your site’s stats pretty simple.  You shouldn’t need to be a geek to just pick out the basics.

Here are 5 analytics packages that are easy to understand and mostly free.

Clicky – Free to $20/month

Clicky

Great user interface with graphs, bar charts and color coded %s to make understanding the information quick and visual.

Clicky also integrates Twiter and FeedBurner stats to monitor the growth of those services.

Paid accounts get a few more features, but the free account is very nice.

WordPress Stats – Free

WordPress

WordPress only, this plugin integrates stats right into the dashboard of your blog.  You get a quick and simple overview of what’s happening on your site, but not really any in-depth information.

W3Counter – Free to $10/month

W3Counter

I haven’t used this service personally, but it includes navigation tracking, city level visitor maps, and a nice, clean interface.  I may have to try it out and see how well it works as it looks promising.

Mint – $30 per site.

Mint

Mint is one of my favorite stats packages due to it’s ability to add and remove modules based on what type of information you want to track.  If you don’t care about user locations, you can disable them.  Want to add download tracking?  Install a Mint Pepper, aka plugin.  Customize it how you want it.

The downside to Mint is that there is a bit more setup involved and you need to have resources available on your site.

BLVD Stats – Free to $?

BLVD

BLVD Stats has a simple interface with colored boxes and plenty of space between information. Great for quick overviews and data consumption.  Downside is that it’s a bit slow a times.  I don’t have a lot of experience with BLVD Stats, but I am trying it out for a few weeks.

One of the great things about analytics is that you can install more than one package on your site.  BloggerDesign runs Google Analytics for in-depth information and have recently added Clicky to get a basic overview when we just want to know what’s happening.

There is no right or wrong program to use, it just depends on what you want to get out of a stats package.  There are plenty of choices and I’m sure there is one that is right for you.

What do you use for analytics on your blog?  Do you have more than one stats package running?

It’s the end of the year and a lot of blogs are now putting out their top posts of the year posts.  But how does one find out which are the top posts on their blog?

Here are a few ways you can find out which posts are tops on your blog.

• Number of Comments – One easy way to see if a post is popular or not is to look at the number of comments.  The more comments, the more engaged people were with the post.  The downside here is that a lot of people may read the post, but only a few may actually comment.
• Number of Trackbacks – How many other blogs are referencing your blog post?  If you have a lot of trackbacks, that means your post could have a far reaching impact across the blogosphere.  However, the quality of those trackbacks is an important thing to check too.
• Social Traffic – How many Diggs did your post get?  Does it have a lot of stumbles?  How well is the post doing in social media sites could be another great indicator if the post is popular or not.  Again, it all depends on the quality of traffic.  StumbleUpon can send a quick 200+ people, but what if they all gave it a thumbs down?
• Analytics – Analytics is a great way to see which posts are getting the most traffic.  Analytics encompasses traffic from other websites, blogs, social media and search engines.  It’s probably the best indicator and the easiest one to pull results from.
• Post Plugins – You can also get plugins such as Post Ratings where users can rate the quality of a post, or you can download one of the popular posts plugins which analyzes things like comments, trackbacks and other indicators they feel are necessary to pull popular posts.
• Use a 3rd Party Service – Sites like PostRank work to analyze each post and come up with a popularity score.  The nice thing here is the other service does all the work for you.

Any one of the items above can help a blogger find out which posts are the most popular on their blogs and help create one of those “Top posts of the year” posts.

What other way have you found to find the most popular posts?

If you missed the announcement just before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, FeedBurner Pro is now free. That’s one of those good things about a Google acquisition; things become free. All users now get Pro stats and MyBrand for feeds.

Honestly, I never quite saw why the Pro features were so great. MyBrand is a cool thing, but I prefer to promote and use my own feed URL that has been redirected to the FeedBurner version.  I do this with the FeedSmith WordPress plugin from FeedBurner.

The two additional stats items do sound nice though. Reach estimates the number of users that interact with our feed (including feed search engine or news filter sites) and we get better click though stats.

Now everyone is a Pro at FeedBurner thanks to Google.

[tags]FeedBurner,Google[/tags]

I’m constantly looking for a nice, quick and easy blog stats. Google Analytics is a great program, but it’s a bit complex for my daily checks. I’ve tried quite a few and recently Performancing Metrics came back online. It’s not really a new service, but it is a great step forward.

Performancing Metrics now uses Clicky stats as its core. It wasn’t built from the ground up, but rather re-branded. I’m not sure what it offers as unique, but regardless, it’s still a nice stats program with the promises of unique features yet to come.

So what makes Performancing Metrics different? Well it’s more about what is happening now then rather aggregating data. It’s great for seeing what’s happening today, but not great for finding out what happened over the past month.

The dashboard shows incoming links, unique visitors, searches and top content. None of it is older than today and it’s a nice overview.

Digging into the analytics a bit you can get visitor information like country, web browser, screen size and OS among others. The actions tab will let you see the visitor’s information including the time and date, what they clicked on, the web browser and OS they used and referring information. It’ll even count downloads, outbound links and FeedBurner subscribers.

Then there is Spy which is really cool. It shows you, in real time, how others are interacting with your site. I had my co-worker go to the site and click on a post title. As she did that, the Spy area in Performancing Metrics told me when she arrived and what she clicked on as it happened. Very cool, yet a huge time waster.

There are two downsides to Performancing Metrics. The first is the daily limit of 1,000 page views on a free account. For $20/year you can have 10,000 daily page views and if you need more, you can spend $50/year for up to 50,000 daily page views.

The second downside is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to finding your top keywords, searches or referring sites for a specific period of time. What’s the top referring domain for June? Well, that’s why I suggest having Google Analytics installed also. [UPDATE] This feature has been added sine this post was written.

Overall, I really like Performancing Metrics. It’s a great way to see what’s happening on your blog right now. It has some great features and is definitely a step up from the old metrics program. However, you should also have Google Analytics installed as Performancing Metrics does lack some features you or your blog consultant may want.