Useful statistics for improving your WordPress

The commonly used analysation plugins for WordPress are:

• Google Analytics ~ automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads.
• WP-Stats ~ displays your WordPress blog statistics. Ranging from general total statistics, some plugins statistics and top 10 statistics.

And we can approach the practice from “what we would like to track and can actually be measured” for getting some useful data to improve your WordPress with. That resulted in tracking requirements such as:

• What your visitors search for ~ Search Meter automatically records what people are searching for — and whether they are finding what they are looking for.
• Your new RSS feed subscribers ~ find out which visitors are more likely to subscribe. Tracking clicks to the feed is not perfect as we can not be sure that people have actually subscribed. Feedage Tracker will automatically submit RSS Feeds to the Feedage.com RSS directory and allows tracking of how often readers subscribe to your RSS feed. FeedSmith works similarly and will be made available directly from FeedBurner as “FeedSmith.”
• Document downloads ~ Download Monitor tracks uploading and managing downloads, download hits, and links.
• Comments ~ I have not found a plugin to recommend yet. Looking tho. Any suggestions?

Don’t over-monitor, or over-track

It costs. Performance. Choose wisely. Maybe reading logs works also?