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My name is Suzanne and I’m obsessed with stats.  Are you?  It can make you crazy sometimes, but it’s not all bad!  While an addiction to stats can lead to the occasional bout with insanity, like wondering why your
traffic is lower on Thursdays (traffic patterns vary widely and sometimes mysteriously), a fascination with website statistics is worth cultivating.  A thorough knowledge of your site’s traffic patterns and behaviors can help you understand what’s working, and what’s not, on your site.  What is your traffic most interested in?  Where does your traffic come from?   What pages do they hit most frequently?  If you use affiliate advertising, you can even figure out which advertising draws the most clicks and follow through by placing more of like ads on your site to pull in more clicks–and therefore more potential purchases.

How to best follow your stats leaves you facing a maze of analytic tools, all of which seem to yield different numbers for the very same site.  Google Analytics (through Google), Awstats (through your cpanel), and Short Stat (a WordPress plugin) are just a few of your decent options–and I use them all–but the absolute favorite now in my stats-obsessing arsenal is Mint.  Mint was developed by the creators of Short Stat and is considered the “pro” version of Short Stat.  Unlike Short Stat, it isn’t a plugin installed in your WordPress admin so it doesn’t slow your site down, hogging resources.  Mint is installed directly through your domain.  It isn’t free–there’s a $30 charge to sign up (additional plugins, called Pepper, to extend your Mint program’s capabilities, are free.)  In my opinion, Mint is well worth the fee.

Mint’s flexible dashboard, configured to your preferences, gives you everything you could possibly want to know to know at a single glance.  Check your visits by past day, past week, past month, past year, totals, uniques, even by the hour.  Watch referrers–newest unique, most recent, repeat, domains.  Keep up with pageviews by the past hour up to the past 72 hours, as well as by most popular, most recent, and most watched.  You can hook your Feedburner right in there to read those stats by past week, past month, past year, subscribers and hits, and most popular Feedburner items.  Get your Technorati ranking, along with inbound blog and other inbound links.  See your searches–how people find your site–by most recent and most popular, and find out what links people use to leave your site.

Install Mint yourself using their easy installation guide and FAQs.  (There’s also a Mint forum for further assistance.)  Or, have your designer install Mint.

What I love about Mint–the attractive, user-friendly, at-a-glance display all on one page and, most of all, its real-time function.  If you love stats, you’ll be head-over-heels for Mint.  So go have a Mint, and don’t forget the Pepper.  Me, I’ve got to go look at my Mint again and see what’s been going on at my site in the past five minutes…..

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