My Three WordPress.com Wishes: Second Wish

More Stats!

Dear @wordpressdotcom More comprehensive statistics #2ndof3wishes #11millionusers Blogger Live Stats Vs WP Stats http://bit.ly/9NJxKq—
JenniferT (@wysiwygjt) July 07, 2010

So the WordPress.com Dashboard Stats page got “sexified”, but still lacks comprehensive statistics like visitor country, time of visit, length of visit, page entry/exit, etc., etc., etc. As far as I know, this information is already being collected on your blog via both Google Analytics and Quantcast. Other 3rd party stats apps such as “whos.amung.us“, “Clicky“, “SiteMeter” and Google Webmaster Tools can fill in some of these blanks, but these utilities can’t do the entire job because of the javascript limitation in place here. Timethief has some excellent information about visitor tracking, and why external stats programs are never quite as accurate as inhouse tracking, on her blog, onecoolsitebloggingtips.com

If not as a part of the basic package, can we say “Paid Upgrade”? There certainly would be a market for it. Check out these forum discussions on Google Analytics and Woopra.

(Should anyone reading this be using the WordPress Stats plugin on their external, self-hosted WordPress install, if you see other kinds of information that we here on WordPress.com don’t, please leave a comment and let the rest of us know.)

One other stat I’d be interested in seeing in all our Dashboards are full subscriber statistics. As it stands now, subscriber stats only reflect the people who signed up to receive your posts by email. If someone subscribed in the WordPress.com Admin Bar and set their Subscription Reader preference to “never”, i.e. read their subscriptions only in the Reader on WordPress.com, they aren’t counted in your subscriber stats.

As an aside, for the truly stats obsessed who use the Chrome web browser, there’s the WordPress Stats extension which will allow you to check your WordPress blog’s stats without having to log in to your site. For users of Firefox, there’s MMD WordPress.com extension. (NAYY) Of course, if you’re checking your blog’s stats continuously, you also may want to seek help for your condition. Just saying…

So that’s my second wish. What about you? Do you have a wish to make your WordPress.com experience rock? Put it in the comments or post your own “My 3 WordPress.com Wishes” and send a backtrack to any of my posts.

Third wish coming soon; stay tuned! Better yet, sign up for my blog’s RSS feed or read by email. You can grab both in my sidebar.

Better shared!