Even for amateur blog authors, understanding your site traffic is critical to building a site that provides information and services that people are asking for.  Even if you are just blogging about your kids soccer game, understanding where your traffic is coming from and what they are doing on the site can not only prove interesting but may help you target your posts for your most faithful readers.

Google Analytics is by far the most popular free web analytics service that is available but with Yahoo’s acquisition of IndexTools in the summer of 2008, Yahoo has been dipping their toe in the deep end and it looks like they are poised to give Google a run for their money.  If I had to bet one way or another, I’d put my money on Google but I wouldn’t count Yahoo out yet as Google has failed to do anything that would suggest they are ready to step on the throats of their competitors.

I have recently been experimenting with Yahoo Web Analytics (YWA) and have been pleasantly surprised with their offering. For a part-time blogger it is more than powerful enough to give you insight into your site activity.

Recently, Rudi Shumpert, released a WordPress plug-in that automatically deploys YWA tracking to your blog.  You don’t need to know PHP or anything about Yahoo’s tracking code, you simply install the plug-in, provide a few details, and the plug-in does the rest.  I have been testing the plug-in and had it installed and running in under two minutes.

What I love most about the plug-in, is that it is theme independent.  I can change my theme a thousand times and never have to worry about moving my analytics tracking code from theme to theme, the plug-in simply applies to code to all the pages of my blog.  It’s a beautiful thing.

If you have an existing YWA account, installation of the plug-in is easy.  Under the Plugins section in your WordPress admin, click ‘Add New’

Search for ‘YWA’ and click install.

For detailed information about configuration steps and plug-in versions, please visit Rudi’s plug-in site

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

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We tend to gravitate to the sensational, hence why nightly news shows are filled with stories of rape and murder and conspiracy, we know deep down it’s wrong, yet we can’t look away. When we get sucked into this world of mystery and intrigue, we tend to throw out logic and believe anything that is flashed before our eyes.

Welcome 2012. The year the world will end. Well, according to popular Mayan belief. But was it really their belief that the world would end on December 21, 2012?

Popular theories of the Mayan’s prediction of the end of the world are based on a very limited set of artifacts. Many believe the Mayans predicted the end of the world based on evidence found in a single book and a set of stone discs. What if the set of discs was incomplete? What if the book was part of a larger volume?

Is this a fair representation of what the Mayan culture believed? Imagine if 10,000 years from now, archeologists discover a single book, containing the story of Hansel and Gretel, while unearthing a public library in Upstate New York. Would it be fair to say that, based on this finding, people that lived circa 1800-2500 lived in houses made purely of a sugar based substance, sometimes baked, other times not, and whose children were susceptible to being eaten by hunched over old ladies wearing over-sized black hats?

Yet, we do this all the time when we analyze the behavior of our web site visitors. We take a nugget of information, a singular fact, and from that we generalize a grand explanation for how an entire system works. I have been guilty of this way of thinking many times.

If we can take one lesson from the apocalyptic hype surrounding the year 2012, it is that we as analysts should be careful about getting sucked into the emotion of sensational news. Rather than becoming overly excited about the first artifact we uncover, we should center ourselves and logically look at all the information we have available to us. We should continue to dig for more truths. And, we should be slow to profess universal truths based on a limited set of data.

Jason Thompson

Jason is the Sr. Director of Community Solutions at Keystone Solutions. If you are interested in partnering with Jason at Keystone, in need of analytics & optimization consulting, or looking for employment/internship possibilities, please feel free to email ‘jason [at] keystonesolutions [dot] com’

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