I have spent a lot of time over the last few months looking for just the right plug-in to track stats on my WindowsObserver.com website and I think I may have hit the mother lode with my most recent discovery.

CyStats is written by Michael Weingaertner and has been downloaded from the WordPress.org Extend directory 32,435 times over the 23 months it has been available there. The last update was last October so it would be nice to see an update however, it works just fine with the current release of WordPress (2.8.4).

According to the author’s description CyStats provides:

• Bounce rate, ignore-by-cookie, ignore-by-ip/post-id/user_agent lists
• hits, visits for day/week/month/year – human or robots
• Top referring pages
• Most read categories and tags
• Most read, most commented posts
• Most read feeds, number of feed visits today
• Internal/external search words
• Operating systems
• Daily, weekly, monthly and yearly statistics
• 404 error requests
• Browsers/clients/tools/…, w/o. version numbers
• Template tags for most read posts, user count,…
• Optional IP-anonymizing
• Multi language support (currently English, German supported).
• Optional tracking of admin area visits

Set up and installation is very easy – just install in the normal manner either via FTP upload or update within your WordPress Admin Plug-in area. Once it is installed and activated the first stop should be the Options under Settings>CyStats. Here you can configure various database settings, statistics tracking (disable userlevel tracking, admin page stats or anonymize IP’s) as well as setting filtering cookies to block IP’s, User Agents and ignoring requests by page or post ID. This page also has the Delete All function and it is highlighted in bright red – do not use this unless you want to completely remove all CyStats info from your database.

On the lower left side of your Admin panel you will see a link for CyStats and a click on that will take you to the main menu for CyStats:

The Index page is broken down into:

Hits and Visits

Pages and Comments

Referrers and Search Words

The Blog page shows recently commented posts; most active comment authors, tags and categories as well as some database statistics for your WordPress site.

The Clients page breaks down  as follows:

Browsers; Operating Systems; Browser versions and tools and scripts (including WordPress)

Robots and Tools; Unknown user agents

On the Referrer page you will find referrers today, yesterday, external referrers and search engine referrers:

The Robots and Tools page is another summary of visits broken down by search engines; email/feed readers; tools and scripts and the unknown user agents:

When you click on the Pages link you will find a summary of your most visited blog pages today; most visited overall; entry pages to your site; 404 error pages and page types (single, archive, feed, 404, home, page, month, category, search, author, day and year):

The last page is the Time page and this gives you a snapshot of your visitors per day; per hour; per weekday; per week; per month and per year. You also get hits per day; per week; per month and per year.

Bottom Line

As you can see from the screenshots this is a very thorough tool and really does give you an in-depth snapshot of your sites visitors. That in turn can help you better layout your site, establish a plan to write on popular subjects and focus your efforts on the areas of your WordPress site that really draws those visitors.  I like this plug-in above others that I have used because it breaks things down between non bot and bot visits which gives me a better idea of human eyes on my site as opposed to machines which can be misleading.

I am very interested in hearing what your favorite methods are for tracking visitors on your website.

All of that being said, with my previous knowledge of Woopra and its capabilities, I was literally floored this afternoon by a flood of new “stuff” that I had either completely missed or capabilities that were added in this new release. So if you are a Woopra user (or if you are not, just sign up), pull up a chair, grab a cup of your favorite beverage and read on. This is pretty cool.

All of the following assumes that you have an active Woopra account, are using WordPress, have the WordPress plugin installed and have the Woopra application (1.1.1.0) installed on your machine.

• With Woopra, and the Woopra WordPress Plugin, you can monitor all your registered users and all your commenters. This sounds obvious/relatively mundane until you install the plugin on your WordPress blog and create an event notification on the application. Follow the bouncing ball.
  • Open up your Woorpa application, click on the manage tab on the left and then click on Create a new Event Notification.
  • Then type in “Known Visitors” into the label box, click Next.
  • On the next window, click and activate the checkbox next to “Visitor is tagged or is a member” and click next until you come to the “Edit Notification’s look and feel” screen.
  • Here click on the “Notification’s Icon” dropdown to click on “visitor’s Avatar” and then paste the following in the “Custom notification message” box: Visitor %NAME% is viewing %PAGETITLE% Then click on Apply Notification button

  Now you will receive a notification on your desktop whenever a registered user or a user who has left a comment, visits your blog. This gets even cooler when you notice their gravatar shows up on the notification and you are now able to track these known visitors are they traverse through your blog. You can even choose to initiate a web chat with these visitors through the Woopra application. The chat shows up on their browser. This is cool and scary at the same time.

• Another cool new tool I discovered today was the little map of the world on the top left corner of the “live” tab. Now I had noticed the map there but had not looked into it much. Look for a small arrow on the top right corner of that map. Once you click on that arrow, the map opens up to a full screen view and now you are able to use your mouses’ scroll wheel to zoom in on any part of the map and use your cursor to identify users. I could spend hours doing this on a busy day.
• I had noticed the small column of labels at the top right hand corner of the Woopra desktop application but had not paid much attention to it. The lowest item on that list is called “live” and once clicked it shows the number of  users on your blog on a moving bar graph, much like whos.amung.us
• The analytics tab has a bunch of hidden gems. Some newer features were also added to the items on this tab. Click on the Analytics tab on the Woopra application and look for the following:
  • The “referrers” tab now has a few new subtabs. They include regular stats stuff like webpages, domains and search engines. But now this tab also include Feed Readers, Emails, Social Bookmarks, Social Networks, Media, News and Communities. Each one of these intrigued me and the I was taken aback by the breakdowns of referrals from various applications. The Email tab gave me the most food for thought. If your blog has email readers or you publish regular newletters via email, this tab could help you identify reader populations from various email services. Clicking on the graph part of the display brings up a historical view.
  • The “pages” tab breaks up visitors by subdirectories. With WordPress’ permalinks, you can now determine how hard your yearly archives are working for you. Apparently, over a thousand people looked at my archives from 2003 this week. As your data grows, this tab could contain breakdowns by tag, by author and any other permalink features that you have enabled through your blog. I wonder why our WordPress tag is so popular?
  • The last tab to point out is “systems”. Now this data can be mundane and almost all stats programs offer some sort of systems breakdown. Woopra adds to this functionality by letting you find permutations of systems options. This blog receives more Chinese speaking, Internet Explorer 6 users on Windows XP than any other language. I will be using that information to my advantage, I am sure you can find your particular niche to help or enhance.

Woopra is a great tool. It is even better with these little tidbits. There are literally thousands of different ways to enhance your stats and understand your reader population better. I have just outlined a few that I had completely missed till today.

Have you found any cool new tricks for Woopra that you would like to share?