If you are like me, you like to know who is coming to your site and how they are getting there. My web host, MediaTemple, uses Urchin. Urchin is fine, but it only updates once every 24 hours or so. I've been on several other hosts that use cPanel, and many of them update infrequently also. Wassup is a great REAL TIME stats tracking plugin for your WordPress blog. There are several really nice features that I will cover in this review. First of all, install is a breeze. You just download the .zip file from Wassup , upload the unzipped folder to your plugins folder, go to your admin panel and activate it. You don't need to tinker with your database (which always makes me a little nervous), change permissions, or manually edit any of your other WordPress .php files. Once installed, WassUp begins tracking stats right away. If you are in your admin panel, you will see a WassUp tab. Click on that tab, and you will be taken to a view that looks like the one below: This is a typical view in WassUp. You can choose to look at stats for the last 24 hours, week, month or year. The current view I am looking at is Everything, which shows all traffic. This is quite messy, as you see all of the search engine robot traffic, pings, etc. A much better view is to either use Referrals via Search Engine or Referrals via External Link.
Here's an example of the data you get when you look at Referrals via Search Engine: This is the kind of data I like. You get the exact keywords the user searched, the search engine used, and even what page of search results your site came up on for the given search. If you are into peeping the users of your site, Wassup is the plugin for you. But wait! There's more.... Wassup also installs a Widget you can use in your sidebar. I chose not to divulge too much information in my Wassup Widget, but you can have yours show as much data as you like. Show the last 5 searches, external link referrals, whatever you like. Editing the options of the widget is straightforward. Just go the Presentation:Widgets menu in Wordpress. Below is a screenshot of the widget setup screen.
The only criticism I have about Wassup is that the db file gets big really quickly. This makes sense, as it's gathering so much data. In the setup screen for Wassup, you can choose to have Wassup email you when your db record gets to a certain size. You can also choose to flush entries older than a certain date if the size of the record is becoming an issue for your performance. Wassup stats plugin for WordPress - Highly recommended
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