page views - a page access statistics gathering plugin
The aim of this plugin is to try and give an accurate account of how actual people are using the site, to a count of people which read the site (by using an aggressive method to exclude all of the bots), which article they have read, and from where they had been referred to the site. Logged-in users, which are usually the blog owner and writers, are excluded as well.
The GUI supplies information on which pages were read, with a clear identification of posts, home page, empty and non existing pages, category pages, author pages, and archive pages. For each page there is information the referrer to the page when the information is known. Other information made available is the external referrers to the site (an aggregate of the per page information), the type of bots reading the site, and the type of browsers being used to read the site.
Instead of the traditional way of identifying bots and browsers by their user-agent string, a method which required having a list of all the user-agents in the world which should be updated any time a new bot or browser is introduced, the plugin identifies bots by their behavior. Bots are usually not “interested” in styling information and therefore if a page load session loads a styling CSS file, it is probably a browser otherwise its a bot. This method is not 100% accurate since there are browsers like lynx which are text only browser, but their use is insignificant.
License: Free for personal use, and for non-profit organizations. Redistribution of this software is not allowed.
Installation: Download this zip file. Extract its content, and transfer the “pageviews” directory and its content to the wp-content/plugins directory of your wordpress installation. Now go to the plugins page in your wordpress administration section, and activate the plugin.
Usage: To view the statistics, go to the administration section, select the dashboard menu and the “page views” sub-menu. The default view shows the most popular pages at the last 24 hours, you can change this settings whenever you need to.
To do in the next releases:
- Improve the look of the GUI
- Group browsers by their manufactures
- Explicitly identify search terms which directed visitors to the site
- Provide widget to display the number of visitors