A crucial aspect of Web site management is tracking performance and observing visitor behaviour. This process provides valuable insights that can be used to improve a Web site, create happy, loyal customers and make an online business more successful. This post talks about three plugins that make this process easier on your WordPress site.

Linking your site with analytics and testing tools

There are numerous plugins that offer analytics reports on what users are doing when they visit your WordPress site, but we much prefer to use Google Analytics for this task. It offers many controls, features and useful tools that really can’t be matched by any single plugin. My first recommendation both integrates your site with Google Analytics and extends its capabilities at the same time.

Google Analytics for WordPress

First and foremost, this plugin makes it easy to add the Google Analytics tracking code to your pages. Rather than adding the code to your footer template and uploading it via FTP, you simply paste your account ID into this plugin’s settings page and it does the rest.

The second benefit on offer is the ability to track outgoing links and file downloads. Google Analytics for WordPress automatically tags any links that lead out of your site. This lets you see the most common exit points and how much traffic you are sending to sites you link to. It is handy to watch out for any unexpected patterns.

Google Website Optimizer for WordPress

Website Optimiser, is a free website testing and optimisation tool from Google. It is built to enable experiments to test the performance of different page designs (commonly called A/B tests, or multivariate tests – this video shows a good example).

This simple plugin lets you optimize your landing pages (as posts or pages) using the Google Website Optimizer without needing to edit the HTML code of the theme. It adds extra input boxes to the ‘Edit page’ or ‘Edit post’ pages to enter the Google Website Optimizer scripts setting your page up as part of a GWO experiment.

Blog Metrics

This plugin is one of the few available to offer statistics and measurements specifically for blogs (rather than for traditional Web sites). It shows a simple snapsnot of activity on your blog, based around author contributions (average posts per month and average words per post), and reader responses (average comments per post and average words per comment). These metrics go beyond the traditional measures of visits, page views or clickthroughs and show levels of engagement with an audience. After all, that is what any good blog should have as its main aim.

Note: For more more ideas on these types of metrics read the original post by Avinash Kaushik which inspired this plugin.

Well that’s it for now. A dozen plugins we at Tactic Group use as standard to make a great publishing platform even better. I hope it’s been a useful series, and look out for more WordPress related posts on this blog in the future.

We’ve since come across some fascinating statistics detailing the top ten countries that Twitter receives traffic from. Our international audience may find this rather eye-opening. Check it out…

The most interesting stat here has to be Japan. Making up 39% of the international Twitter traffic, which is 60% of the overall, Japan equates for 23.4% of total Twittering.

This came as a surprise to us here at Tactic Group, but we’re certainly going to look into it further.

Read the report on the Twitter blog for more information.